Related papers: Basaltic material in the main belt: a tale of two …
Ceres is the largest and most massive body in the asteroid main belt. Observational data from the Dawn spacecraft reveal the presence of at least two impact craters about 280~km in diameter on the Ceres surface, that could have expelled a…
The surface composition of Vesta, the most massive intact basaltic object in the asteroid belt, is interesting because it provides us with an insight into magmatic differentiation of planetesimals that eventually coalesced to form the…
Vesta, the second largest Main Belt asteroid, will be the first to be explored in 2011 by NASA's Dawn mission. It is a dry, likely differentiated body with spectrum suggesting that is has been resurfaced by basaltic lava flows, not too…
The recent discovery of the first V-type asteroid in the middle belt, (21238) 1995WV7, located at ~2.54 AU, raises the question of whether it came from (4) Vesta or not. In this paper, we present spectroscopic observations indicating the…
Improving constraints on the abundance of basaltic asteroids in the main asteroid belt is necessary for better understanding the thermal and collisional environment in the early solar system, for more rigorously identifying the genetic…
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,…
Most Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED) meteorites (analogs to V-type asteroids) are thought to originate from asteroid (4) Vesta. However, some HEDs show distinct oxygen isotope ratios and therefore are thought to originate from other…
Asteroid families are groups of minor bodies produced by high-velocity collisions. After the initial dispersions of the parent bodies fragments, their orbits evolve because of several gravitational and non-gravitational effects,such as…
We report visible to near-infrared spectroscopy and spectrophotometry of asteroid (21238) 1995 WV7 that reveal the presence of deep absorption bands indicating a V taxonomic type with an apparently basaltic surface composition. Since this…
The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has…
Vesta is the only currently identified asteroid for which we possess samples, which revealed us that the asteroid is differentiated and possesses a relatively thin basaltic crust that survived to the evolution of the asteroid belt and the…
We have carried out a search for Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs) co-orbiting with the large MBA Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Through improving the search criteria used in (Christou, 2000b) and numerical integrations of candidate coorbitals,…
The NASA Dawn mission has extensively examined the surface of asteroid Vesta, the second most massive body in the main belt. The high quality of the gathered data provides us with an unique opportunity to determine the surface and internal…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
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…
The study of asteroid families has provided tremendous insight into the forces that sculpted the main belt and continue to drive the collisional and dynamical evolution of asteroids. The identification of asteroid families within the NEO…
Using albedos from WISE/NEOWISE to separate distinct albedo groups within the Main Belt asteroids, we apply the Hierarchical Clustering Method to these subpopulations and identify dynamically associated clusters of asteroids. While this…
Gaia Data Release 2 includes observational data for 14,099 pre-selected asteroids. From the sparsely sampled G band photometry, we derive lower-limit lightcurve amplitudes for 11,665 main belt asteroids in order to provide constraints on…
The near-Earth asteroid population suggests the existence of an inner Main Belt source of asteroids that belongs to the spectroscopic X-complex and has moderate albedos. The identification of such a source has been lacking so far. We argue…
Volatile compositions of asteroids provide information on the Solar System history and the origins of Earth's volatiles. Visible to near-infrared observations at wavelengths of $<2.5\ {\rm \mu m}$ have suggested a genetic link between outer…