Related papers: Micro-meteoroid seismic uplift and regolith concen…
Granular material that is bound by the low gravity of a small asteroid is mobilized by slow velocity impacts. These splashes generated by impacts might play an important role in sculpting the asteroid's surface. In laboratory experiments we…
Context: Asteroids with a diameter of up to a few dozen meters may spin very fast and complete an entire rotation within a few minutes. These small and fast-rotating bodies are thought to be monolithic objects because the gravitational…
Conditions for regolith landslides to occur on spinning, gravitating spheroidal asteroids and their aftermath are studied. These conditions are developed by application of classical granular mechanics stability analysis to the asteroid…
Understanding the geological modification processes on asteroids can provide information concerning their surface history. Images of small asteroids from spacecraft show a depletion in terms of smaller craters. Seismic shaking was…
Recent discoveries show that asteroids spinning in less than a few minutes undergo sizeable semi-major-axis drifts, possibly driven by the Yarkovsky effect. Analytical formulas can match these drifts only if very low thermal inertia is…
Remote sensing observations by Hayabusa2 and laboratory measurements have revealed that the phyllosilicates on asteroid (162173) Ryugu are dehydrated/dehydroxylated due to space weathering. Reactive molecular dynamics simulations were…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We experimentally study the velocity scaling of granular convection which is a possible mechanism of the regolith migration on the surface of small asteroids. In order to evaluate the contribution of granular convection to the regolith…
Impact cratering plays a crucial role in shaping the surfaces of small bodies, satellites, and planets, providing insights into their formation and the history of the Solar System. Small bodies are often covered with low-cohesion regolith.…
The distributions of size and chemical composition in the regolith on airless bodies provides clues to the evolution of the solar system. Recently, the regolith on asteroid (25143) Itokawa, visited by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft, was…
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…
The main motivation of this research is the analytical exploration of the dynamics of asteroid rotation when it moves in elliptic orbit through Space. According to the results of Efroimsky, Frouard (2016), various perturbations (collisions,…
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…
<Abridged> The impact of a meteoroid onto an asteroid transfers linear and angular momentum to the larger body, which may affect its orbit and its rotational state. Here we show that the meteoroid environment of our Solar System can have an…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid is an indicator of the thermophysical properties of the regolith and is determined by the size of grains on the surface. Previous thermophysical modeling studies of asteroids have identified or suggested…
To deflect impact-trajectory of massive km^3 and spinning asteroid by a few terrestrial radius one need a large momentum exchange. The dragging of huge spinning bodies in space by external engine seems difficult or impossible. Our solution…
Owing to the extremely low gravity of small near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), it has been assumed that impact-generated rock fragments escape into space and thus do not contribute to the accumulation of regolith. However, centimeter-sized stones…