Related papers: Mineralogy and Surface Composition of Asteroids

Although petrologic, chemical and isotopic studies of ordinary chondrites and meteorites in general have largely helped establish a chronology of the earliest events of planetesimal formation and their evolution, there are several questions…

Knowledge of the surface thermal inertia of an asteroid can provide insight into surface structure: porous material has a lower thermal inertia than rock. We develop a means to estimate thermal inertia values of asteroids and use it to show…

The physical composition and structure of meteoroids gives us insight into the formation processes of their parent asteroids and comets. The strength of and fundamental grain sizes in meteoroids tell us about the environment in which small…

The asteroid belt is a unique source of information on some of the most important questions facing solar system science. These questions include the sizes, numbers, types and orbital distributions of the planetesimals that formed the…

We present a new extensive analysis of the old problem of finding a satisfactory calibration of the relation between the geometric albedo and some measurable polarization properties of the asteroids. To achieve our goals, we use all…

Asteroid surfaces are subjected to mechanical weathering processes that result in the development and evolution of regolith. Two proposed mechanisms--impact bombardment and thermal fatigue--have been proposed as viable and dominant…

The rapid accumulation of thermal infrared observations and shape models of asteroids has led to increased interest in thermophysical modeling. Most of these infrared observations are unresolved. We consider what fraction of an asteroid's…

The composition of Solar System surfaces can be inferred through reflectance and emission spectroscopy, by comparing these observations to laboratory measurements and radiative transfer models. While several populations of objects appear to…

Asteroid spectroscopy reflects surface mineralogy. There are few thousand asteroids whose surfaces have been observed spectrally. Determining the surface properties of those objects is important for many practical and scientific…

The examination of the physical properties of chondrules has generally received less emphasis than other properties of meteorites such as their mineralogy, petrology, and chemical and isotopic compositions. Among the various physical…

The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has…

We study the surface composition of asteroids with visible and/or infrared spectroscopy. For example, asteroid taxonomy is based on the spectral features or multiple color indices in visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The composition of…

We investigate the spectra, material properties, and orbital distribution of millimeter- to decimeter-sized meteoroids. Our study aims to distinguish the characteristics of populations of differently sized meteoroids and reveal the…

Polarization phase curves of asteroids and other small airless bodies are influenced by the compositional and physical properties of their regolith. The mixing of minerals composing the regolith influences the negative polarization at small…

Meteor spectroscopy presents new opportunities for investigating the diversity of small Solar System bodies and capturing the real distribution of present material types. We analyze 180 higher-resolution meteor spectra from the All-sky…

While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…

Phase reddening is an effect that produces an increase of the spectral slope and variations in the strength of the absorption bands as the phase angle increases. In order to understand its effect on spectroscopic observations of asteroids,…

Meteorite craters on the asteroid surface obstruct the horizontal flow of solar wind, forming a plasma wake that modulates the particle fluxes and the electrostatic environment far downstream. In this study, surface charging properties of…

Investigations of the main asteroid belt and efforts to constrain that population's physical characteristics involve the daunting task of studying hundreds of thousands of small bodies. Taxonomic systems are routinely employed to study the…

Polarization phase-curve measurements provide a unique constraint on the surface properties of asteroids that are complementary to those from photometry and spectroscopy, and have led to the identification of the ``Barbarian'' asteroids as…