Related papers: Analysis of Asteroid (216) Kleopatra using dynamic…
Some asteroids eject dust, unexpectedly producing transient, comet-like comae and tails. First ascribed to the sublimation of near-surface water ice, mass losing asteroids (also called "main-belt comets") can in fact be driven by a…
In addition to stellar data, Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) also contains accurate astrometry and photometry of about 14,000 asteroids covering 22 months of observations. We used Gaia asteroid photometry to reconstruct rotation periods, spin…
We develop a shape model of asteroid 16 Psyche using observations acquired in a wide range of wavelengths: Arecibo S-band delay-Doppler imaging, Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) plane-of-sky imaging, adaptive optics (AO) images from…
Small bodies in our Solar System are considered remnants of their early formation. Studying their physical and dynamic properties can provide insights into their evolution, stability, and origin. ESA's Rosetta mission successfully landed…
Results from the TESS mission showed that previous studies strngly underestimated the number of slow rotators, revealing the importance of studying those asteroids. For most slowly rotating asteroids (P > 12), no spin and shape model is…
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…
We present a series of numerical simulations using a shock physics smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code, investigating energetic impacts on small celestial bodies characterised by diverse internal structures, ranging from weak and…
We present the analysis and computational results for the inclination relative effect of moonlets of triple asteroidal systems. Perturbations on moonlets due to the primarys non-sphericity gravity, the solar gravity, and moonlets relative…
In this paper we present an analysis of Kepler K2 mission Campaign 3 observations of the irregular Neptune satellite, Nereid. We determined a rotation period of P=11.594(+/-)0.017 h and amplitude of dm=0.0328(+/-)00018, confirming previous…
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…
Hubble Space Telescope observations of active asteroid 324P/La Sagra near perihelion show continued mass loss consistent with the sublimation of near-surface ice. Isophotes of the coma measured from a vantage point below the orbital plane…
We present an analytical model for the non-spherical collapse of overdense regions out of a Gaussian random field of initial cosmological perturbations. The collapsing region is treated as an ellipsoid of constant density, acted upon by the…
Binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target of the proposed NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), part of the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission concept. In this mission, the DART spacecraft is…
We describe the first determination of thermal properties and size of the M-type asteroid (16) Psyche from interferometric observations obtained with the Mid-Infrared Interferometric Instrument (MIDI) of the Very Large Telescope…
We describe in this work a thorough study of the physical and orbital characteristics of extensively observed main-belt and Trojan binaries, mainly taken from the LAOSA (Large Adaptive Optics Survey of Asteroids, Marchis et al., 2006c)…
The Yarkovsky (orbital drift) and YORP (spin state change) effects play important roles in the dynamical and physical evolution of asteroids. Thermophysical modelling of these observed effects, and of thermal-infrared observations, allows a…
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…
Between 2010 and 2017 we have collected new optical and radar observations of the potentially hazardous asteroid (2102)~Tantalus from the ESO NTT and Danish telescopes at the La Silla Observatory and from the Arecibo planetary radar. The…
Binary asteroid formation is a highly complex process, which has been highlighted with recent observations of satellites with unexpected shapes, such as the oblate Dimorphos by the NASA DART mission and the contact binary Selam by NASA's…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…