Related papers: Asteroid Surface Geophysics
When creating asteroid regolith simulant, it is necessary to have a model of asteroid regolith to guide and to evaluate the simulant. We created a model through evaluation and synthesis of the available data sets including (1) the returned…
Exploratory missions have found that regolith on interplanetary bodies can be loosely packed and freely flowing, a state that strongly affects mission plans and that may also influence the large scale shapes of these bodies. We investigate…
Despite their very low surface gravities, asteroids exhibit a number of different geological processes involving granular matter. Understanding the response of this granular material subject to external forces in microgravity conditions is…
It is known, from observational data recorded from airbursts, that small asteroids breakup at dynamical pressures lower than their mechanical strength. This means that actual theoretical models are inconsistent with observations. In this…
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…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
We numerically investigate how an asteroid's elongation controls the sensitivity of its surface to tidal effects during a distant planetary encounter beyond the Roche limit. We analyze the surface slope and its variation by considering the…
The geophysics of extrasolar planets is a scientific topic often regarded as standing largely beyond the reach of near-term observations. This reality in no way diminishes the central role of geophysical phenomena in shaping planetary…
The rotational mass loss has been realized to be a prevalent mechanism to produce low-speed debris near the asteroid, and the size composition of the asteroid's surface regolith has been closely measured by in situ explorations. However,…
Asteroids and other Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs) are of high general and scientific interest in many aspects. The origin, formation, and evolution of our Solar System (and other planetary systems) can be better understood by analysing…
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…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
Lunar regolith, the layer of unconsolidated material covering the Moon's surface, is central to the science and technology developed for the Moon, notably related to in-situ science investigations, resource utilization, surface…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
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…
Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…
Simulations inform all aspects of modern astrophysical research, ranging in scale from 1D and 2D test problems that can run in seconds on an astronomer's laptop all the way to large-scale 3D calculations that run on the largest…
In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this…
According to Shoemaker, the "impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets", as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been…
Physicists face major challenges in modelling multi-scale phenomena that are observed in geophysical flows (e.g. in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, or liquid planetary cores). In particular, complexities arise because geophysical fluids…