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The Planck mission, originally devised for cosmological studies, offers the opportunity to observe Solar System objects at millimetric and submillimetric wavelengths. We concentrate in this paper on the asteroids of the Main Belt. We intend…
We present the results of the first-ever visible spectroscopic survey fully dedicated to the small (absolute magnitude H>20) near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population. Observations have been performed at the New Technology Telescope (NTT) of the…
To deflect impact-trajectory of massive km^3 and spinning asteroid by a few terrestrial radius one need a large momentum exchange. The dragging of huge spinning bodies in space by external engine seems difficult or impossible. Our solution…
Numerical modeling has long suggested that gravitationally-bound (or so-called rubble-pile) near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) can be destroyed by tidal forces during close and slow encounters with terrestrial planets. However, tidal disruptions…
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,…
In the last decades Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have become very important targets to study, since they can give us clues to the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. In addition, they may represent either a threat to…
Exploration of asteroids and comets can give insight into the origins of the solar system and can be instrumental in planetary defence and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Asteroids, due to their low gravity are a challenging target for…
The Gaia second data release contains high-accuracy astrometric measurements of thousands of solar system bodies. These measurements raise the possibility of determining asteroid masses by modeling scattering events between massive objects…
So far, more than 130 extrasolar planets have been found in multiple stellar systems. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of the planetary formation process can lead to different planetary architectures (i.e. location, size, mass,…
We advocate a low-cost strategy for long-duration research into the 'milligravity' environment of asteroids, comets and small moons, where surface gravity is a vector field typically less than 1/1000 the gravity of Earth. Unlike the…
Small aperture telescopes provide the opportunity to conduct high frequency, targeted observations of near-Earth Asteroids that are not feasible with larger facilities due to highly competitive time allocation requirements. Observations of…
Recent works have shown that the thermal inertia of km-sized near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is more than two orders of magnitude higher than that of main belt asteroids (MBAs) with sizes (diameters) between 200 and 1,000 km. This confirms the…
Dynamical models of the asteroid delivery from the main belt suggest that the current impact flux of diameter D>10 km asteroids on the Earth is 0.5-1 per Gyr. Studies of the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) population find a much higher flux, with…
Direct detection of dark matter continues to elude scientists' many attempts to see it interact, and still to this day the only way we know it is there is through observed gravitational effects. The many search experiments are at the point…
Large-area surveys operating at mid-infrared wavelengths have proven to be a valuable means of discovering and characterizing minor planets. Through the use of radiometric models, it is possible to derive physical properties such as…
We publicly release ATM, a Python package designed to model asteroid flux measurements to estimate an asteroid's size, surface temperature distribution, and emissivity. The full multi-dimensional posterior pdf is found using Markov Chain…
The subject of this work is the physical characterization of asteroids, focusing on the thermal inertia of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). Thermal inertia governs the Yarkovsky effect, a non-gravitational force which significantly alters the…
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),…
The Gaia mission started its regular observing program in the summer of 2014, and since then it is regularly obtaining observations of asteroids. This paper draws the outline of the data processing for Solar System objects, and in…
A method for asteroid deflection that makes use of a spacecraft moving back and forth on a segment of an appropriate Keplerian orbit about the asteroid is described and evaluated. It is shown that, on average, the spacecraft describing such…