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Small bodies are the remnant building blocks from the time when the planets formed and migrated to their current positions. Their volatile composition and relative abundances serve as time capsules for the formation conditions in the…
The aim of the chapter is to summarize our understanding of the compositional distribution across the different reservoirs of small bodies (main belt asteroids, giant planet trojans, irregular satellites of the giant planets, TNOs, comets).…
Comets are important "eyewitnesses" of Solar System formation and evolution. Important tests to determine the chemical composition and to study the physical processes in cometary nuclei and coma need data in the UV range of the…
The richness of dynamical behavior exhibited by the rotational states of various solar system objects has driven significant advances in the theoretical understanding of their evolutionary histories. An important factor that determines…
Comets hold the key to the understanding of our solar system, its formation and its evolution, and to the fundamental plasma processes at work both in it and beyond it. A comet nucleus emits gas as it is heated by the sunlight. The gas…
Motivated by recent visits from interstellar comets, along with continuing discoveries of minor bodies in orbit of the Sun, this paper studies the capture of objects on initially hyperbolic orbits by our solar system. Using an ensemble of…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…
The orbital evolution of more than 22000 Jupiter-crossing objects under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. We found that the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects (from initial orbits close to the…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
The order and chaos of the motion near equilibrium points in the potential of a rotating highly irregular-shaped celestial body are investigated from point of view of the dynamical system theory. The positions of the non-degenerate…
Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are a transient population of small bodies with orbits near or in the terrestrial planet region. They represent a mid-stage in the dynamical cycle of asteroids and comets, which starts with their removal from the…
Rings are ubiquitous around giant planets in our Solar System. They evolve jointly with the nearby satellite system. They could form either during the giant planet formation process or much later, as a result of large scale dynamical…
Proper elements are quasi-integrals of motion, meaning that they can be considered constant over a certain timespan, and they permit to describe the long-term evolution with a few parameters. Near-Earth objects (NEOs) generally have a large…
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…
Debris disks are exoplanetary systems containing planets, minor bodies (such as asteroids and comets) and debris dust. Unseen planets are presumed to perturb the minor bodies into crossing orbits, generating small dust grains that are…
Phase resolved observations of planetary bodies allow us to understand the longitudinal and latitudinal variations that make each one unique. Rotational variations have been detected in several types of astronomical bodies beyond those of…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…
Imaging and resolved spectroscopy reveal varying environmental conditions in our dynamic solar system. Many key advances have focused on how these conditions change over time. Observatory-level commitments to conduct annual observations of…
The regolith-covered surfaces of asteroids preserve records of geophysical processes that have occurred both at their surfaces and sometimes also in their interiors. As a result of the unique micro-gravity environment that these bodies…