Related papers: Landslides and Mass Shedding on Spinning Spheroida…
We aim to understand how landslides affect the shape and rotational motion of small rubble planetary bodies. We limit ourselves to axisymmetric global landslides, and take the primordial shape of the body to also be axisymmetric. The…
Recent space missions have provided substantial evidence of regolith movement on the surfaces of near Earth asteroids. To investigate this phenomenon, we present a continuum-based model that describes regolith motion on nearly spherical…
The regolith-covered surfaces of asteroids preserve records of geophysical processes that have occurred both at their surfaces and sometimes also in their interiors. As a result of the unique micro-gravity environment that these bodies…
The migration of cohesive regolith on the surface of an otherwise monolithic or strong asteroid is studied using theoretical and simulation models. The theory and simulations show that under an increasing spin rate (such as due to the YORP…
Spin off events and impacts can eject boulders from an asteroid surface and rubble pile asteroids can accumulate from debris following a collision between large asteroids. These processes produce a population of gravitational bound objects…
Asteroid (99942) Apophis' close approach in 2029 will be one of the most significant small-body encounter events in the near future and offers a good opportunity for in situ exploration to determine the asteroid's surface properties and…
An asteroid spun up to its critical limit has unique surface mechanical properties that its gravity and the centrifugal force largely balance, creating a relaxation environment where low-energy events such as mass shedding may trigger…
Surface shedding of an asteroid is a failure mode where surface materials fly off due to strong centrifugal forces beyond the critical spin period, while the internal structure does not deform significantly. This paper proposes a possible…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
Solar system small bodies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, which are achieved following very individual evolutional paths through billions of years. This paper focuses on the reshaping process of rubble-pile asteroids driven by…
We numerically investigate how an asteroid's elongation controls the sensitivity of its surface to tidal effects during a distant planetary encounter beyond the Roche limit. We analyze the surface slope and its variation by considering the…
The rotational mass loss has been realized to be a prevalent mechanism to produce low-speed debris near the asteroid, and the size composition of the asteroid's surface regolith has been closely measured by in situ explorations. However,…
The sedimentation of a rigid particle near a wall in a viscous fluid has been studied numerically by many authors, but analytical solutions have been derived only for special cases such as the motion of spherical particles. In this paper…
While the number of asteroids with known shapes has drastically increased over the past few years, little is known on the the time-evolution of shapes and the underlying physical processes. Here we propose an averaged abrasion model based…
In situ observations of small asteroids show that surfaces covered by boulders and coarse terrain are frequent on such bodies. Regolith grain sizes have distributions on approximately mm and cm scales, and the behavior of such large grains…
This paper studies the long-term migration of disturbed regolith materials on the surface of Solar System small bodies from the viewpoint of nonlinear dynamics. We propose an approximation model for secular mass movement, which combines the…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
Seismic shaking is an attractive mechanism to explain the destabilisation of regolith slopes and the regolith migration found on the surfaces of asteroids (Richardson et al. 2004; Miyamoto et al. 2007). Here, we use a continuum mechanics…
Boulders, rocks and regolith on fast rotating asteroids (<2.5 hours) are modeled to slide towards the equator due to a strong centrifugal force and a low cohesion force. As a result, regions of fresh subsurface material can be exposed.…