Related papers: Stress and Failure Analysis of Rapidly Rotating As…

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…

Asteroid 2016 HO3, a small asteroid (<60 m) in super fast rotation state (~28 min), and is the target of China's Tianwen-2 asteroid sample-return mission. In this work, we investigate its structural stability using an advanced…

In this work, we employ a soft-sphere discrete element method with a cohesion implementation to model the dynamical process of sub-km-sized cohesive rubble piles under continuous spinup. The dependencies of critical spin periods $T_c$ on…

The rubble pile spin barrier is an upper limit on the rotation rate of asteroids larger than ~200-300 m. Among thousands of asteroids with diameters larger than ~300 m, only a handful of asteroids are known to rotate faster than 2.0 h, all…

In this paper we perform an assessment of the 2880 Earth impact risk for asteroid (29075) 1950 DA. To obtain reliable predictions we analyze the contribution of the observational dataset and the astrometric treatment, the numerical error in…

Many asteroids are rubble piles with irregular shapes. While the irregular shapes of large asteroids may be attributed to collisional events, those of small asteroids may result from not only impact events but also rotationally induced…

Jewitt et al. (2014) recently reported that main belt comet P/2013 R3 experienced a breakup, probably due to rotational disruption, with its components separating on mutually hyperbolic orbits. We propose a technique for constraining…

Superfast rotators (SFRs) are small solar system objects that rotate faster than generally possible for a cohesionless rubble pile. Their rotational characteristics allow us to make inferences about their interior structure and composition.…

The implication of small amounts of cohesion within relatively small rubble pile asteroids is investigated with regard to their evolution under the persistent presence of the YORP effect. We find that below a characteristic size, which is a…

We explore the hypothesis that, due to small van der Waals forces between constituent grains, small rubble pile asteroids have a small but non-zero cohesive strength. The nature of this model predicts that the cohesive strength should be…

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…

Active asteroid (6478) Gault sheds mass independent of location along its orbit. Rotational instability is considered to induce the observed activities. If this is the case, because Gaults breakup event has not been detected, surface…

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…

Given the spin state by Magnusson (1990), the shape model by Ostro et al. (2000), and the mass by Descamps et al. (2011), this paper evaluates a dynamically and structurally stable size of Asteroid (216) Kleopatra. In particular, we…

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…

This paper presents transition of the failure mode of a cohesive, spherical body due to YORP spin-up. On the assumption that the distribution of materials in the body is homogeneous, failed regions first appearing in the body at different…

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 present recent improvements of the modeling of the disruption of strength dominated bodies using the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. The improvements include an updated strength model and a friction model, which are…

The 99942 Apophis close encounter with Earth in 2029 may provide information about asteroid's physical characteristics and measurements of Earth's effects on the asteroid surface. In this work, we analysed the surface and the nearby…

The near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis is a potentially hazardous asteroid. We obtained far-infrared observations of this asteroid with the Herschel Space Observatory's PACS instrument at 70, 100, and 160 micron. These were taken at two…