Related papers: Asteroid Surface Geophysics
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
The exploration of small body asteroids provides direct access to the primitive building blocks of our solar system. Sample and return missions enable chemical and radioisotope studies which not only provide evidence for the formation of…
We present a new method for the determination of the surface properties of airless bodies from measurements of the emitted infrared flux. Our approach uses machine learning techniques to train, validate, and test a neural network…
Small asteroids intersecting Earth's orbit can deliver extraterrestrial rocks to the Earth, called meteorites. This process is accompanied by a luminous phenomena in the atmosphere, called bolides or fireballs. Observations of bolides…
Dust grains play a central role in the physics and chemistry of cosmic environments. They influence the optical and thermal properties of the medium due to their interaction with stellar radiation; provide surfaces for the chemical…
The orbital evolution of particles released from the surface of a rubble-pile body by Earth's tides during flyby within the Roche limit is studied. Test particles initially placed on the surface leave the surface and escape the parent body.…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with small perihelion distances reach sub-solar temperatures of > 1000 K. They are hypothesized to undergo "super-catastrophic" disruption, potentially caused by near-Sun processes such as thermal cracking,…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…
We are now in an era where we can image details on the surfaces of stars. When resolving stellar surfaces, we see that every surface is uniquely complicated. Each imaged star provides insight into not only the stellar surface structures,…
Asteroid modeling efforts in the last decade resulted in a comprehensive dataset of almost 400 convex shape models and their rotation states. This amount already provided a deep insight into physical properties of main-belt asteroids or…
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…
Surface processes on cosmic solids in cold astrophysical environments lead to gas phase depletion and molecular complexity. Most astrophysical models assume that the molecular ice forms a thick multilayer substrate, not interacting with the…
The orbital structure of the asteroid belt holds a record of the Solar System's dynamical history. The current belt only contains ${\rm \sim 10^{-3}}$ Earth masses yet the asteroids' orbits are dynamically excited, with a large spread in…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
Satellites around large asteroids are preferentially found among those with the most rapid rotation and elongated shape. The taxonomic statistics are similarly skewed; in total, 13 asteroids larger than 100 km are known to have satellites,…
We study the morphological evolution of surfaces during ion sputtering and we compare their dynamical roughening with aeolian ripple formation in sandy deserts. We show that, although the two phenomena are physically different, they must…
We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
Astrophysical sources emit gravitational waves in a large variety of processes occurred since the beginning of star and galaxy formation. These waves permeate our high redshift Universe, and form a background which is the result of the…