Related papers: A comprehensive model of the meteoroid environment…
Combining dynamical models of dust from Jupiter Family Comets and Halley-type Comets, we demonstrate that the seasonal variation of the dust/meteoroid environment at Mercury is responsible for producing the dawn-dusk asymmetry in Mercury's…
Radar and spacecraft observations show the permanently shadowed regions around Mercury's North Pole to contain water ice and complex organic material. One possible source of this material are impacts by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs),…
A circumsolar dust ring has been recently discovered close to the orbit of Mercury. There are currently no hypotheses for the origin of this ring in the literature, so we explore four different origin scenarios here: the dust originated…
We describe how meteors recorded at the Earth can be used to partly reconstruct the meteoroid environments of the planets if a large sample (i.e. millions of orbits at a minimum) is available. The process involves selecting from the…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
The orbital distributions of dust particles in interplanetary space are inferred from several meteoroid data sets under the constraints imposed by the orbital evolution of the particles due to the planetary gravity and Poynting-Robertson…
Meteoroids pose one of the largest risks to spacecraft outside of low Earth orbit. In order to correctly predict the rate at which meteoroids impact and damage spacecraft, environment models must describe the mass, directionality, velocity,…
We describe a new version (numbered 3.1) of NASA's Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) in which we extend the model to handle locations that lie more than a few degrees in latitude off the ecliptic plane. We provide our algorithms for…
(1) Ceres, the largest reservoir of water in the main-belt, was recently visited by the Dawn spacecraft that revealed several areas bearing H$_2$O-ice features. Independent telescopic observations showed a water exosphere of currently…
The objectives of this project are to predict new meteor showers associated with as many as possible known periodic comets and to find a generic relationship of some already known showers with these comets. For a potential parent comet, we…
The chemical composition of a planetary body reflects its starting conditions modified by numerous processes during its formation and geological evolution. Measurements by X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutron spectrometers on the MESSENGER…
This review summarizes the research of Mercury's magnetosphere in the Post-MESSENGER era and compares its dynamics to those in other planetary magnetospheres, especially to those in Earth's magnetosphere. This review starts by introducing…
This paper presents synthetic observations of long-lived, coorbiting asteroids of Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars. Our sample is constructed by taking the limiting semimajor axes, differential longitudes and inclinations for long-lived…
Previous studies of cometary impacts in the outer Solar System used the spatial distribution of ecliptic comets (ECs) from dynamical models that assumed ECs began on low-inclination orbits (<5 deg) in the Kuiper belt. In reality, the source…
After the prediction of meteor showers in the Earth's atmosphere caused by the particles originating in the nucleus of comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, we went on with the prediction of showers on the other three terrestrial planets. Based on…
Mercury, due to its close location to the Sun, is surrounded by an environment whose conditions may be considered as "extreme" in the entire Solar System. Both solar wind and radiation are stronger with respect to other Solar System bodies,…
NASA's Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) is designed to provide aerospace engineers with an accurate description of potentially hazardous meteoroids. It accepts a spacecraft trajectory as input and its output files describe the flux, speed,…
In the late stages of accretion leading up to the formation of planetesimals, particles grew to pebbles the size of 1-mm to tens of cm. That is the same size range that dominates the present-day comet mass loss. Meteoroids that size cause…
The MESSENGER mission sought to discover what physical processes determined Mercury's high metal to silicate ratio. Instead, the mission has discovered multiple anomalous characteristics about our innermost planet. The lack of FeO and the…