Related papers: Asteroid Surface Geophysics
Despite their very low surface gravities, the surfaces of asteroids and comets are covered by granular materials - regolith - that can range from a fine dust to a gravel-like structure of varying depths. Understanding the dynamics of…
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…
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…
The scaling of physical forces to the extremely low ambient gravitational acceleration regimes found on the surfaces of small asteroids is performed. Resulting from this, it is found that van der Waals cohesive forces between regolith…
Methods to constrain the surface mineralogy of asteroids have seen considerable development during the last decade with advancement in laboratory spectral calibrations and validation of our interpretive methodologies by spacecraft…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
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…
Near-Earth small-body mission targets 162173 Ryugu, 101955 Bennu, and 25143 Itokawa produce gravity fields around 4 orders of magnitude below that of Earth and their irregular shapes, combined with rotational effects produce varying surface…
The dusty regolith covering the surfaces of asteroids and planetary satellites differs in size, shape, and composition from terrestrial soil particles and is subject to very different environmental conditions. Experimental studies of the…
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…
We present recent improvements in the simulation of regolith sampling processes in microgravity using the numerical particle method smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH). We use an elastic-plastic soil constitutive model for large deformation…
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…
Porosity is a key characteristic of the regolith on the surface of small bodies. The porosity of the regolith on the surface of asteroids is changed by applied pressure, and the relationship between pressure and porosity depends on the…
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 field of asteroid thermophysical modeling has experienced an extraordinary growth in the last ten years, as new thermal infrared data became available for hundreds of thousands of asteroids. The infrared emission of asteroids depends on…
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…
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…
We present a framework to study regolith segregation on rubble-pile asteroids (self-gravitating granular aggregates) due to seismic shaking induced by impacts sustained during their lifetimes. We first relate the amplitude and frequency of…
This paper presents a brief review and latest results of the work that has been carried out by the Planetary Science community in order to understand that role of the geotechnical properties of granular asteroids (commonly known as…
In the past decade, hundreds of asteroid shape models have been derived using the lightcurve inversion method. At the same time, a new framework of 3-D shape modeling based on the combined analysis of widely different data sources such as…