Related papers: A family-based method of quantifying NEOWISE diame…
Thermal infrared measurements of near-Earth objects provide critical data for constraining their physical properties such as size. The NEOWISE mission has been conducting an all-sky infrared survey to gather such data and improve our…
We describe interferometric observations of the asteroid (41) Daphne in the thermal infrared obtained with the Mid-Infrared Interferometric Instrument (MIDI) of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). We derived the size and the…
A determination of the dynamical evolution of the asteroid belt is difficult because the asteroid belt has evolved since the time of asteroid formation through mechanisms that include: (1) catastrophic collisions, (2) rotational disruption,…
Asteroid spectroscopy reflects surface mineralogy. There are few thousand asteroids whose surfaces have been observed spectrally. Determining the surface properties of those objects is important for many practical and scientific…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
We propose a scenario for the formation of the Main Belt in which asteroids incorporated icy particles formed in the outer Solar Nebula. We calculate the composition of icy planetesimals formed beyond a heliocentric distance of 5 AU in the…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
Differentiated asteroids are rare in the main asteroid belt despite evidence for ~100 distinct differentiated bodies in the meteorite record. We have sought to understand why so few main-belt asteroids differentiated and where those…
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…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
We investigated the physical and thermal properties of 65 Cybele}, one of the largest main-belt asteroids. Based on published and recently obtained thermal infrared observations, including ISO measurements, we derived through thermophysical…
Our goal is to understand primary accretion of the first planetesimals. The primitive meteorite record suggests that sizeable planetesimals formed in the asteroid belt over a period longer than a million years, each composed entirely of an…
After performing a reassessment of the known dynamical asteroid families in the inner main belt, we report a newly discovered ancient asteroid family with an estimated age of $4.3\pm1.7$ billion years. Additionally, we report the most…
Eos family was created during a catastrophic impact about 1.3 Gyr ago. Rotation states of individual family members contain information about the history of the whole population. We aim to increase the number of asteroid shape models and…
The size-dependent effects of asteroids on surface regolith and collisional lifetimes suggest that small asteroids are younger than large asteroids. In this study, we performed multicolor main-belt asteroid (MBA) survey by Subaru…
A collisional family is a collection of >km-size asteroid fragments produced by a large scale collision between asteroids. Here we cataloged 335 notable collisional families in the main asteroid belt. When possible, we estimated each…
We have calculated 90% confidence limits on the steady-state rate of catastrophic disruptions of main belt asteroids in terms of the absolute magnitude at which one catastrophic disruption occurs per year (HCL) as a function of the…
Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are fragments of remnant primitive bodies that date from the era of Solar System formation. At present, the physical properties and origins of NEOs are poorly understood. We have measured thermal emission from…
The size distribution of small asteroids in the Main Belt is assumed to be determined by an equilibrium between the creation of new bodies out of the impact debris of larger asteroids and the destruction of small asteroids by collisions…
Errors in the kinematic distances, under the assumption of circular gas orbits, were estimated by performing synthetic observations of a model disk galaxy. It was found that the error is < 0.5 kpc for most of the disk when the measured…