Related papers: Yarkovsky-driven impact risk analysis for asteroid…
We present our investigations of the physical and dynamical properties of selected Earth co-orbital asteroids. The photometric optical light curves as well as rotation periods and pole solutions for a sample of four Earth co-orbital…
On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. Numerical simulations of the impact provide a means to…
We present an automated system called NEORANGER that regularly computes asteroid-Earth impact probabilities for objects on the Minor Planet Center's (MPC) Near-Earth-Object Confirmation Page (NEOCP) and sends out alerts of imminent…
The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully impacted the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system on 2022 September 26 UTC. We provide an update to its pre-impact mutual orbit and estimate the post-impact…
Many asteroids that make close encounters with terrestrial planets are in a binary configuration. Here we calculate the relevant encounter timescales and investigate the effects of encounters on a binary's mutual orbit. We use a combination…
In this paper we define the a posteriori probability W. This quantity is introduced with the aim of suggesting a reliable interpretation of the actual threat posed by a newly discovered Near Earth Asteroid (NEA), for which impacting orbital…
Debris disks and asteroid belts are expected to form around young pulsars due to fallback material from their original supernova explosions. Disk material may migrate inwards and interact with a pulsar's magnetosphere, causing changes in…
Context: Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA) in Earth-crossing orbits pose a constant threat to life on Earth. Several mitigation methods have been proposed, and the most feasible technique appears to be the disintegration of the impactor…
A widely circulated infrared video from 2024 appears to show an air-to-surface missile engaging a small luminous "orb"-like object, producing debris and an apparent deflection of the missile's trajectory. This paper presents a comprehensive…
Disagreement in estimations of the observed acceleration of Phobos yields several theories empirically modifying classical description of motion of the satellite, but its orbital positions detected by Mars-aimed spacecraft differ from…
Gaia Data Release 3 contains accurate photometric observations of more than 150,000 asteroids covering a time interval of 34 months. With a total of about 3,000,000 measurements, a typical number of observations per asteroid ranges from a…
Asteroid impacts pose a major threat to all life on Earth. The age of the dinosaurs was abruptly ended by a 10-km-diameter asteroid. Currently, a nuclear device is the only means of deflecting large Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)…
Knowledge of the surface thermal inertia of an asteroid can provide insight into surface structure: porous material has a lower thermal inertia than rock. We develop a means to estimate thermal inertia values of asteroids and use it to show…
As a consequence of the large (and growing) number of near-Earth objects discovered, some of them are lost before their orbit can be firmly established to ensure long-term recovery. A fraction of these present non-negligible chances of…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
We investigate the long-term dynamical survival of Earth co-orbital asteroids, focusing on near-circular, near-planar orbits which existing studies suggest are the most stable. Through numerical integration of test particles we show that…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
Short-arc orbit determination is crucial when an asteroid is first discovered. In these cases usually the observations are so few that the differential correction procedure may not converge. We have developed an initial orbit computation…
We describe observations and physical characteristics of Earth-crossing asteroid 2024 YR$_4$, discovered on 2024 December 27 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. The asteroid has semi-major axis, $a$ = 2.52 au,…
The Yarkovsky effect describes a small but significant force that affects the orbital motion of meteoroids and asteroids smaller than $30-40$ kilometers in diameter. It is caused by sunlight; when these bodies heat up in the Sun, they…