Related papers: How to find metal-rich asteroids
We report measured spectral properties for more than 1000 NEOs, representing>5% of the currently discovered population. Thermal flux detected below 2.5 {\mu}m allows us to make albedo estimates for nearly 50 objects, including two comets.…
Context. The study of old, metal-poor stars deepens our knowledge on the early stages of the universe. In particular, the study of these stars gives us a valuable insight into the masses of the first massive stars and their emission of…
Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with small perihelion distances reach sub-solar temperatures of > 1000 K. They are hypothesized to undergo "super-catastrophic" disruption, potentially caused by near-Sun processes such as thermal cracking,…
Methods to constrain the surface mineralogy of asteroids have seen considerable development during the last decade with advancement in laboratory spectral calibrations and validation of our interpretive methodologies by spacecraft…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
Studying a range of old metal-poor stars provides information over cosmological timescales of our Galaxy. Such studies are indicative of the pristine gases and evolution of the Milky Way. Deriving stellar parameters and abundances from…
Metallic bodies that were the cores of differentiated bodies are sources of iron meteorites and are considered to have formed early in the terrestrial planet region before migrating to the main asteroid belt. Surface temperatures and mutual…
Determining the size and orbital distribution of the population of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is the focus of intense research, with the most recent models converging to a population of approximately $1000$ NEAs larger than 1 km and up to…
It is known that near-Earth objects (NEOs) during their orbital evolution may often undergo close approaches to the Sun. Indeed it is estimated that up to ~70% of them end their orbital evolution colliding with the Sun. Starting from the…
We have begun the ExploreNEOs project in which we observe some 700 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) at 3.6 and 4.5 microns with the Spitzer Space Telescope in its Warm Spitzer mode. From these measurements and catalog optical photometry we derive…
We publicly release ATM, a Python package designed to model asteroid flux measurements to estimate an asteroid's size, surface temperature distribution, and emissivity. The full multi-dimensional posterior pdf is found using Markov Chain…
The continuing monitoring and surveying of the nearby space to detect Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are essential because of the threats that this kind of objects impose on the future of our planet. We need more…
Among the currently known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), roughly 1400 are classified as being potentially hazardous asteroids. The recent Chelyabinsk event has shown that these objects can pose a real threat to mankind. We illustrate that high…
By measuring the elemental abundances of a star, we can gain insight into the composition of its initial gas cloud -- the formation site of the star and its planets. Planet formation requires metals, the availability of which is determined…
Despite the large amount of high quality data generated in recent space encounters with asteroids, the majority of our knowledge about these objects comes from ground based observations. Asteroids travelling in orbits that are potentially…
The near-Earth object (NEO) population is a window into the original conditions of the protosolar nebula, and has the potential to provide a key pathway for the delivery of water and organics to the early Earth. In addition to delivering…
Summary: In the past decade both scientists and laymen have probably heard at least once through the newspapers, TV and Internet that a new asteroid has been discovered with non-zero (sometimes "high") probability of collision with the…
Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…
Asteroids that could collide with the Earth are listed on the publicly available Near-Earth object (NEO) hazard web sites maintained by the US and European space agencies (NASA and ESA). The impact probability distribution of 69 potentially…
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids, comets and meteoroids in heliocentric orbits with perihelion below 1.3 au. Similarly to the population of the Main Asteroid Belt, NEOs are primordial bodies and their study can improve our…