Related papers: Quantifying hazards: asteroid disruption in lunar …
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will impact its target asteroid, Dimorphos, at an oblique angle that will not be known prior to the impact. We computed iSALE-3D simulations of DART-like impacts on asteroid surfaces at…
The Asteroid Tugboat (AT) is a fully controlled asteroid deflection concept using a robotic spacecraft powered by a high efficiency, electric propulsion system (ion or plasma) which docks with and attaches to the asteroid, conducts…
Long-term integrations of asteroid orbits with high-accuracy numerical integrators are essential for understanding dynamical evolution and ejection from the Solar System, but are computationally expensive. Here, we investigate the dynamical…
In 2022 the DART mission spacecraft impacted the asteroid Dimorphos, the secondary body of the binary Didymos system, ejecting a large number of dust particles, rocks and boulders. The ESA Hera mission will reach the system in 2026 for…
Exploration of small bodies, namely comets and asteroids remain a challenging endeavor due to their low gravity. The risk is so high that missions such as Hayabusa II and OSIRIS-REx will be performing touch and go missions to obtain…
The process of capture in the coorbital region of a solar system planet is studied. Absolute capture likelihood in the 1:1 resonance is determined by randomly constructed statistical ensembles numbering $7.24\times 10^5$ of massless…
On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. Numerical simulations of the impact provide a means to…
Aerodynamic collision avoidance manoeuvres provide an opportunity for satellites in Low Earth Orbits to reduce the risk during close encounters. With rising numbers of satellites and objects in orbit, satellites experience close encounters…
Tumbling asteroids belong to a small group of objects, whose angular velocity vector is unaligned with any of its principal axes of inertia. This leads to challenging efforts to model the trajectory of any spacecraft designed to orbit these…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
In recent years, understanding asteroids has shifted from light worlds to geological worlds by exploring modern spacecraft and advanced radar and telescopic surveys. However, flyby in 2029 will be an opportunity to conduct an internal…
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will kinetically impact Dimorphos, the secondary component of the Didymos binary asteroid system, which will excite Dimorphos's dynamical state and lead to significant libration about…
Planetary bodies such as asteroids, comets, and planetary moons are high-value science targets as they hold important information about the formation and evolution of our solar system. However, due to their low-gravity, variable sizes and…
Close encounters of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with large asteroids are a possible source of systematic errors in trajectory propagations and asteroid mitigation. It is, thus, necessary to identify those large asteroids that have to be…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
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…
Mid-Air Deployment (MAD) of a rotorcraft during Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) on Mars eliminates the need to carry a propulsion or airbag landing system. This reduces the total mass inside the aeroshell by more than 100 kg and simplifies…
The focus of this work is the current distribution of asteroids in co-orbital motion with Venus, Earth and Jupiter, under a quasi-coplanar configuration and for a medium-term timescale of the order of 900 years. A co-orbital trajectory is a…
A new method for the line-of-sight velocity estimation of a high-speed near-Earth object (asteroid, meteorite) is suggested. The method is based on use of fractional, one-half order derivative of a Doppler signal. The algorithm suggested is…
We analytically work out the orbital effects caused by a Rindlertype extra-acceleration ARin which naturally arises in some recent models of modified gravity at large distances. In particular, we focus on the perturbations induced by it on…