Related papers: Asteroid Surface Geophysics
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
The Earth's surface is composed of a staggering diversity of particulate-fluid mixtures: dry to wet, dilute to dense, colloidal to granular, and attractive to repulsive particles. This material variety is matched by the range of relevant…
Satellites of asteroids have been discovered in nearly every known small body population, and a remarkable aspect of the known satellites is the diversity of their properties. They tell a story of vast differences in formation and evolution…
Mean motion resonances play a fundamental role in the dynamics of the small bodies of the Solar System. The last decades of the 20th century gave us a detailed description of the dynamics as well as the process of capture of small bodies in…
Observations with radar, photometric and direct imaging techniques have discovered that multiple asteroid systems can be divided clearly into a handful of different morphologies, and recently, the discovery of small unbound asteroid systems…
Stylolites are ubiquitous geo-patterns observed in rocks in the upper crust, from geological reservoirs in sedimentary rocks to deformation zones, in folds, faults, and shear zones. These rough surfaces play a major role in the dissolution…
The practical distinctions between asteroids and comets, viewed as products of accretion on either side of the snow line, are less clear-cut than previously understood. In this chapter, we discuss the numerous solar system populations which…
Space weathering is the generic term used for processes that modify the optical properties of surfaces of atmosphereless rocky bodies under exposure to the space environment. The general agreement about the relevance of the effects of space…
In granular systems, thermal cycling causes compaction, creep, penetration of dense objects, and ratcheting of grains against each other. On asteroid surfaces, thermal cycling is high amplitude and can happen billions of times in a few…
Asteroid surveys are the backbone of asteroid science, and with this in mind we begin with a broad review of the impact of asteroid surveys on our field. We then provide a brief history of asteroid discoveries so as to place contemporary…
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…
During its year-long orbital mission, the Dawn spacecraft has mapped the surface of main-belt asteroid Vesta multiple times at different spatial resolutions and illumination and viewing angles. The onboard Framing Camera has acquired…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
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 thermal inertia of an asteroid's surface can provide insight into regolith properties, such as the presence of a layer of fine dust, the density and thermal conductivity of a rocky surface, and, together with other observational data,…
The compression property of regolith reflects the strength and porosity of the regolith layer on small bodies and their variations in the layer that largely influence the collisional and thermal evolution of the bodies. We conducted…
This contribution has the aim to review the basics of existing knowledge on asteroid interiors and to explore the possibility of advancing the field by introducing into it some ideas from solid state physics.
This is an overview of recent research on meteors and the parent bodies from which they are produced. While many meteor showers result from material ejected by comets, two out of the three strongest annual showers (the Geminids and the…
Surface charging phenomenon of asteroids, mainly resulting from solar wind plasma and solar radiation, has been studied extensively. However, the influence of asteroid's rotation on surface charging has yet to be fully understood. Here…
Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and…