Related papers: Optimized Bucket Wheel Design for Asteroid Excavat…
Permanent lunar settlements will rely on in situ oxygen production from regolith for life support and propulsion. While oxygen is abundant in lunar materials, it is chemically bound within metal oxides whose extractability depends strongly…
Context. Recent observations of dust ejections from active asteroids, including (3200) Phaethon, have drawn considerable interest from planetary astronomers studying the generation and removal of small dust particles on asteroids. Aims. In…
To date, the most widespread scenario is that the Earth originated without water and was brought to the planet mainly due to impacts by wet asteroids coming from further out in space. However, many uncertainties remain regarding the exact…
Leveraging advancements in micro-scale technology, we propose a fleet of autonomous, low-cost, small solar sails for interplanetary exploration. The Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail (BLISS) project aims to utilize small-scale…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…
Asteroid Ryugu and asteroid Bennu, which were recently visited by spacecraft Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, respectively, are spinning top-shaped rubble piles. Other axisymmetric top-shaped near-Earth asteroids have been observed with…
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,…
Superfast rotators (SFRs) are small solar system objects that rotate faster than generally possible for a cohesionless rubble pile. Their rotational characteristics allow us to make inferences about their interior structure and composition.…
We modeled the trajectories of material ejected from 20 nearby debris disk stars, including Epsilon Eridani (Ran), Vega, Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris, within a simulated Milky Way potential in order to quantify their contribution to the…
The prospect of establishing extra-terrestrial habitats using in situ resource utilization (ISRU) constitutes a long-term goal of multiple space agencies around the world. In this work, we investigate sintering as a potential route for…
Transporting solids of different sizes is an essential process in the evolution of protoplanetary disks and planet formation. Large solids are supposed to drift inward; high-temperature minerals found in comets are assumed to have been…
Recent space missions have provided information on the physical and chemical properties of interstellar grains such as the ratio $\beta$ of radiation pressure to gravity acting on the grains in addition to the composition, structure, and…
Given the compositional diversity of asteroids, and their distribution in space, it is impossible to consider returning samples from each one to establish their origin. However, the velocity and molecular composition of primary minerals,…
Construction of the precise shape of an asteroid is critical for spacecraft operations as the gravitational potential is determined by spatial mass distribution. The typical approach to shape determination requires a prolonged mapping phase…
There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions in the Main Belt. They are diverse in physical properties and composition and are time capsules of the early solar system. This makes them strategic locations for planetary…
Early detection and tracking of ejecta in the vicinity of small solar system bodies is crucial to guarantee spacecraft safety and support scientific observation. During the visit of active asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft relied on…
Context. Most small asteroids (<50 km in diameter) are the result of the breakup of a larger parent body and are often considered to be rubble-pile objects. Similar structures are expected for the secondaries of small asteroid binaries,…
In order to improve our understanding of landing on small bodies and of asteroid evolution, we use our novel drop tower facility to perform low-velocity (2-40 cm s^-1), shallow impact experiments of a 10 cm diameter aluminum sphere into…
The design and scale of a future mission to directly image and characterize potentially Earth-like planets will be impacted, to some degree, by the expected yield of such planets. Recent efforts to increase the estimated yields, by creating…
This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. To compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple…