Related papers: How to find metal-rich asteroids

The Near Earth Object Surveyor mission has a requirement to find two-thirds of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 meters in size. In order to determine the mission's expected progress toward this goal during design and…

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are small Solar System bodies whose orbits bring them close to the Earth's orbit. We are carrying out a Warm Spitzer Cycle 11 Exploration Science program entitled NEOSurvey --- a fast and efficient flux-limited…

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft has been brought out of hibernation and has resumed surveying the sky at 3.4 and 4.6 um. The scientific objectives of the NEOWISE reactivation mission are to detect, track, and…

The NEOWISE dataset offers the opportunity to study the variations in albedo for asteroid classification schemes based on visible and near-infrared observations for a large sample of minor planets. We have determined the albedos for nearly…

Near-infrared spectroscopy of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) connects diagnostic spectral features to specific surface mineralogies. The combination of spectroscopy with albedos and diameters derived from thermal infrared observations can…

We present the results of the first-ever visible spectroscopic survey fully dedicated to the small (absolute magnitude H>20) near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population. Observations have been performed at the New Technology Telescope (NTT) of the…

Undifferentiated asteroids, particularly the parent bodies of carbon-rich chondrite groups, might be promising candidates for future space resource utilization due to their primitive composition and potential to host valuable metals and…

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) reactivation mission has completed its third year of surveying the sky in the thermal infrared for near-Earth asteroids and comets. NEOWISE collects simultaneous…

While proper orbital elements are currently available for more than 1 million asteroids, taxonomical information is still lagging behind. Surveys like SDSS-MOC4 provided preliminary information for more than 100,000 objects, but many…

Context. The study of planet-crossing asteroids is of both practical and fundamental importance. As they are closer than asteroids in the Main Belt, we have access to a smaller size range, and this population frequently impacts planetary…

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are excellent laboratories for testing processes that affect airless bodies, as well as informing us about Solar System history. Though most NEOs are nominally anhydrous because they formed inside the Solar System…

The known near-Earth object (NEO) population consists of over 32,000 objects, with a yearly discovery rate of over 3000 NEOs per year. An essential component of the next generation of NEO surveys is an understanding of the population of…

A simple formalism is presented to assess how many asteroids contain ore, i.e. commercially profitable material, and not merely a high concentration of a resource. I apply this formalism to two resource cases: platinum group metals (PGMs)…

We report on our search for genetically related asteroids amongst the near-Earth object (NEO) population - families of NEOs akin to the well known main belt asteroid families. We used the technique proposed by Fu et al. (2005) supplemented…

We report results of a four-year survey using Electron Multiplied Charged Coupled Device (EMCCD) cameras recording 34761 two-station video meteor events complete to a limiting magnitude of +6. The survey goal was to characterize probable…

Chemical and mineral compositions of asteroids reflect the formation and history of our Solar System. This knowledge is also important for planetary defence and in-space resource utilisation. We aim to develop a fast and robust…

Knowledge of the interior density distribution of an asteroid can reveal its composition and constrain its evolutionary history. However, most asteroid observational techniques are not sensitive to interior properties. We investigate the…

Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply of resources vital for human civilization. Preliminary analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining…

The number of ore-bearing asteroids could well be small and remote telescopic techniques are inadequate to identify such asteroids confidently. Finding an asteroid that can be profitably mined requires proximate observations from assay…

Here we explore a technique for constraining physical properties of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) based on variability in thermal emission as a function of viewing aspect. We present case studies of the low albedo, near-Earth asteroids…