Related papers: Recent multi-kiloton impact events: are they truly…
Close encounters of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with large asteroids are a possible source of systematic errors in trajectory propagations and asteroid mitigation. It is, thus, necessary to identify those large asteroids that have to be…
Superfireballs are rare phenomena for which the reports are scarce and the estimation of their abundance has a huge margin of uncertainty. As a citizen science project we have gathered >500 reports from newspapers in the 1850-2000 period.…
Temporarily Captured Orbiters (TCOs) are Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) which make a few orbits of Earth before returning to heliocentric orbits. Only one TCO has been observed to date, 2006 RH120, captured by Earth for one year before escaping.…
Context. Orbital similarity measures, such as the D-values, have been extensively used in meteor science to identify meteoroid streams and associate meteorite falls with near-Earth objects (NEOs). However, the chaotic nature of near-Earth…
Numerical modeling has long suggested that gravitationally-bound (or so-called rubble-pile) near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) can be destroyed by tidal forces during close and slow encounters with terrestrial planets. However, tidal disruptions…
NEOs come close to the Earth's orbit so that any dust ejected from them, might be seen as a meteor shower. Orbits evolve rapidly, so that a similarity of orbits at one given time is not suffcient to prove a relationship, orbital evolution…
It has been 20 years since planning began for the 1995 United Nations International Conference on Near-Earth Objects. The conference proceedings established the scientific basis for an international organizational framework to support…
A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…
Tunguska and Chelyabinsk impact events occurred inside a geographical area of only 3.4\% of the Earth's surface. Although two events hardly constitute a statistically significant demonstration of a geographical pattern of impacts, their…
The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…
The orbital evolution of more than 22000 Jupiter-crossing objects under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. We found that the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects (from initial orbits close to the…
It is a well-known fact that the presence of a massive perturber interacting with a population of minor bodies following very eccentric orbits can strongly affect the distribution of their nodal distances. The details of this process have…
The most significant periodicities in the terrestrial impact crater record are due to the human-signal: the bias of assigning integer values for the crater ages. This bias seems to have eluded the proponents and opponents of real…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
We assess the fragmentation of strange quark matter in astrophysical events, showing that the application of statistical multifragmentation models suggests that most of the fragments (strangelets) should belong to an unstable baryon number…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…
Sungrazing comets have always captured a lot of interest and curiosity among the general public as well as scientists since ancient times. The perihelion passage of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) at the end of this year (on 2013 November 28) is an…
Recent data indicate one or more moderately nearby supernovae in the early Pleistocene, with additional events likely in the Miocene. This has motivated more detailed computations, using new information about the nature of supernovae and…
Only a very small fraction of the asteroid population at size scales comparable to the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia has been discovered to date, and physical properties are poorly characterized. We present previously…
Context. The discovery and tracking of 2018 LA marks only the third instance in history that the parent body of a fireball has been identified before its eventual disintegration in our atmosphere. The subsequent recovery of meteorites from…