Related papers: A Fast Ellipsoid Model for Asteroids Inverted From…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid's surface can provide insight into regolith properties, such as the presence of a layer of fine dust, the density and thermal conductivity of a rocky surface, and, together with other observational data,…
We report the comparison between unresolved reflectance spectroscopy of Solar System small bodies and laboratory measurements on reference surfaces. We measure the bidirectional reflectance spectroscopy of a powder of howardite and a…
An asteroid pair consists of two unbound objects with almost identical heliocentric orbital elements that were formed when a single "rubble pile" asteroid failed to remain bound against an increasing rotation rate. Models suggest that the…
Direct detection of dark matter continues to elude scientists' many attempts to see it interact, and still to this day the only way we know it is there is through observed gravitational effects. The many search experiments are at the point…
The obliquity of a terrestrial planet is an important clue about its formation and critical to its climate. Previous studies using simulated photometry of Earth show that continuous observations over most of a planet's orbit can be inverted…
The rotational properties of $\sim$10~m-scale asteroids are poorly understood with only a few measurements. Additionally, collisions or thermal recoil can spin their rotations to periods less than a few seconds obfuscating their study due…
We present a reanalysis of the relationship between asteroid albedo and polarization properties using the albedos derived from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. We find that the function that best describes this relation is a…
Asteroid body-fixed hovering problem using nonideal solar sail models in a compact form with controllable sail area is investigated in this paper. The nonlinear dynamic equations for the hovering problem are constructed for a spherically…
Asteroid binaries found amongst the Near-Earth objects are believed to have formed from rotational fission. In this paper, we aim to study the dynamical evolution of asteroid systems the moment after fission. The initial condition is…
We have created a new image analysis pipeline to reprocess images taken by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking survey and have applied it to ten nights of observations. This work is the first large-scale reprocessing of images from an asteroid…
We select 50 main-belt asteroids with a diameter between 20 and 400 km for which we have (i) shape models derived by the lightcurve inversion method (LI) and (ii) resolved observations of good quality collected with the Keck II adaptive…
We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of using a satellite-based sensor with visual and infrared focal plane arrays to search for NEAs with orbits largely interior to the Earth's orbit. Such a space-based system could detect…
This article investigates reconstructing the internal mass density of a numerical asteroid model using the gradient of a simulated gravity field as synthetic measurement data. Our goal is to advance the mathematical inversion methodology…
The subject of this work is the physical characterization of asteroids, focusing on the thermal inertia of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). Thermal inertia governs the Yarkovsky effect, a non-gravitational force which significantly alters the…
Meteor light curves are sometimes known to display flickering: rapid, quasi-periodic variations in brightness. This effect is generally attributed to the rotational modulation of the ablation rate, which is caused by the time-varying cross…
We describe a generalised method for ellipsoid fitting against a minimum set of data points. The proposed method is numerically stable and applies to a wide range of ellipsoidal shapes, including highly elongated and arbitrarily oriented…
A method for classifying orbits near asteroids under a polyhedral gravitational field is presented, and may serve as a valuable reference for spacecraft orbit design for asteroid exploration. The orbital dynamics near asteroids are very…
At a mean diameter of ~650 m, the near-Earth asteroid (455213) 2001 OE84 (OE84 for short) has a rapid rotation period of 0.486542+-0.000002 hours, which is uncommon for asteroids larger than ~200 m. We revisited OE84 14 years after it was…
Using the first 18 months of the Pan-STARRS 1 survey we have identified 33 candidate high-amplitude objects for follow-up observations and carried out observations of 22 asteroids. 4 of the observed objects were found to have observed…
The classification of the minor bodies of the Solar System based on observables has been continuously developed and iterated over the past 40 years. While prior iterations followed either the availability of large observational campaigns or…