Related papers: The Cratering History of Asteroid (21) Lutetia
Asteroid (7) Iris is an ideal target for disk-resolved imaging owing to its brightness (V$\sim$7-8) and large angular size of 0.33 arcsec during its apparitions. Iris is believed to belong to the category of large unfragmented asteroids…
We present a new crater chronology for Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. This tool can be used to interpret the collisional history of the bodies observed by NASA's Lucy mission. The Lucy mission will visit a total of six Trojan asteroids:…
The impact flux over the last 3 Ga in the inner Solar System is commonly assumed to be constant through time. However, asteroid break-up events in the main belt may have been responsible for cratering spikes over the last ~2 Ga on the…
Asteroid collisions are one of the main processes responsible for the evolution of bodies in the main belt. Using observations of the Dimorphos impact by the DART spacecraft, we estimate how asteroid collisions in the main belt may look in…
Iapetus, the outermost regular satellite of Saturn, has a drastic albedo dichotomy and an equatorial circumferential ridge that reaches heights of 20 km and widths of 70 km. This moon is thought to have formed concurrently with Saturn, and…
Dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, has a surface that exhibits a range of crater densities for a crater diameter range of 5-300 km. In all areas the shape of the craters' size-frequency distribution is very…
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
The main belt asteroids 458271 (2010 UM26) and 2010 RN221 share almost identical orbital elements and currently appear as comoving objects 30 arcsec apart in the plane of the sky. They are products of the breakup of a parent object, or the…
(1270) Datura is the largest member of a very young asteroid cluster that was thought to be broken-up 0.45 Myr ago. The light-curve and the rotation-resolved reflectance spectra (0.6 um - 1.0 um) were observed in order to find "fresh"…
Boulders are ubiquitously found on the surfaces of small rocky bodies in the inner solar system and their spatial and size distributions give insight into the geological evolution and collisional history of the parent bodies. Using images…
Pluto and its satellites will be the most distant objects ever reconnoitered when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducts its intensive flyby of this system in 2015. The size-frequency distribution (SFD) of craters on the surfaces in the…
Ceres is the largest and most massive body in the asteroid main belt. Observational data from the Dawn spacecraft reveal the presence of at least two impact craters about 280~km in diameter on the Ceres surface, that could have expelled a…
New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy…
We infer the crater chronologies of Ceres and Vesta from a self-consistent dynamical model of asteroid impactors. The model accounts for planetary migration/instability early in the solar system history and tracks asteroid orbits over 4.56…
Asteroid (596) Scheila was the first object for which the immediate aftermath of an inter-asteroidal collision was observed. In Dec. 2010, the 113 km-sized asteroid was impacted by a smaller asteroid of less than 100 m in diameter. The…
The largest asteroids in the Koronis family (sizes $\geq 25$ km) have very peculiar rotation state properties, with the retrograde- and prograde-rotating objects being distinctly different. A recent e-analysis of observations suggests that…
We report new observations of the active asteroid P/2010 A2 taken when it made its closest approach to the Earth (1.06 au in 2017 January) after its first discovery in 2010. Despite a crucial role of the rotational period in clarifying its…
The OSIRIS camera onboard Rosetta successfully acquired images of asteroid 2867 Steins through a variety of color filters during the flyby on 5 September 2008. The best images of this 5 km diameter asteroid have a resolution of 78 meters…
We searched for young asteroid families -- those with ages t_age < 10 Myr and at least three members -- using the proper element catalog from Nesvorny et al. (2024). Our approach employed the Hierarchical Clustering Method (HCM) in a…
Impact crater counts on the Saturnian satellites are a key element for estimating their surface ages and placing constraints on their impactor population. The Cassini mission radar observations allowed crater counts to be made on the…