Related papers: An Early Warning System for Asteroid Impact
This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. To compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple…
The population of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) shows a large variety of objects in terms of physical and dynamical properties. They are subject to planetary encounters and to strong solar wind and radiation effects. Their study is also…
With N-body simulations of a planetary system with an asteroid belt we investigate how the asteroid impact rate on the Earth is affected by the architecture of the planetary system. We find that the $\nu_6$ secular resonance plays an…
The increase in space debris is a threat to space assets, space based-operations and led to a common effort to develop programs for dealing with this increase. As part of the Portuguese Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) project, led by…
Cometary impacts pose a long-term hazard to life on Earth. Impact mitigation techniques have been studied extensively, but they tend to focus on asteroid diversion. Typical asteroid interdiction schemes involve spacecraft physically…
ATLAS (Astrophysics Telescope for Large Area Spectroscopy) is a concept for a NASA probe-class space mission. It is the spectroscopic follow-up mission to WFIRST, boosting its scientific return by obtaining deep NIR & MIR slit spectroscopy…
Small asteroids and large meteoroids frequently impact the Earth, though their physical and material properties remain poorly understood. When observed as fireballs in Earth's atmosphere, these properties can be inferred from their ablation…
Transient astrophysical events are characterized by short timescales, high energy, and multi-wavelength radiation, often accompanied by violent energy releases. These phenomena are a major focus of modern astronomical research. To reveal…
Small asteroids intersecting Earth's orbit can deliver extraterrestrial rocks to the Earth, called meteorites. This process is accompanied by a luminous phenomena in the atmosphere, called bolides or fireballs. Observations of bolides…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) provides the opportunity for ground-breaking observations of asteroids. It covers wavelength regions that are unavailable from the ground, and does so with unprecedented sensitivity. The main-belt and…
This paper presents a robust linear method for impact probability estimation of near-Earth asteroids with the Earth. This method is a significantly modified and improved method, which uses a special curvilinear coordinate system associated…
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory designed to discover and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The mission's primary objective is to find the majority of objects large enough to cause severe…
In the last decades Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have become very important targets to study, since they can give us clues to the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. In addition, they may represent either a threat to…
The impact of large-scale constellations of satellites, is a concern for ground-based astronomers. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit and this trend is set to continue. The…
(99942) Apophis is a potentially hazardous asteroid that will closely approach the Earth on April 13, 2029. Although the likelihood of an impact has been ruled out, this close encounter represents a unique opportunity for planetary science…
Analytical approximations are commonly employed in the initial trajectory design phase of a mission to rapidly explore a broad design space. In the context of an asteroid deflection mission, accurately predicting deflection is crucial to…
In the late 1990s, the Arecibo Observatory and its planetary radar system were upgraded to increase sensitivity by a factor of 20. This upgrade substantially improved the quality of the data and the ability to observe terrestrial planets,…
The release of Gaia catalog is revolutionary to the astronomy of solar system objects. After some effects such as atmospheric refraction and CCD geometric distortion have been taken into account, the astrometric precision for ground-based…
Understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroids through the secular Yarkovsky effect requires the determination of many physical properties, including the rotation period. We propose a method aimed at obtaining a robust determination of…
The overall shape, internal structure and surface morphology of small bodies such as asteroids and comets are determined to a large degree by the last global-scale impact or disruption event. Depending on the specific energy, impacts lead…