Related papers: Regolith behavior under asteroid-level gravity con…
Following the recent insight in the material structure of comets, protoplanetesimals are assumed to have low densities and to be highly porous agglomerates. It is still unclear if planetesimals can be formed from these objects by…
Asteroid (99942) Apophis' close approach in 2029 will be one of the most significant small-body encounter events in the near future and offers a good opportunity for in situ exploration to determine the asteroid's surface properties and…
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…
We present the modeling results of the thermal lightcurve of asteroid (3) Juno at the wavelength of $\lambda$ = 1.3 mm measured by the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array. A thermophysical model together with a radiative transfer…
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,…
Context. Circumstellar disks are known to contain a significant mass in dust ranging from micron to centimeter size. Meteorites are evidence that individual grains of those sizes were collected and assembled into planetesimals in the young…
Aeolian sediment transport is observed to occur on Mars as well as other extraterrestrial environments, generating ripples and dunes as on Earth. The search for terrestrial analogues of planetary bedforms, as well as environmental…
Collisional evolution is a key process in planetesimal formation and decimetre bodies play a key role in the different models. However, the outcome of collisions between two dusty decimetre bodies has never been studied experimentally.…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…
Estimating surface properties such as porosity and grain sizes is key for planning lander missions and landing site selection on icy moons. However, spaceborne instruments do not measure the regolith properties directly: instead, they…
The exploration of small body asteroids provides direct access to the primitive building blocks of our solar system. Sample and return missions enable chemical and radioisotope studies which not only provide evidence for the formation of…
This work analyzes the energetics of asteroid rubble piles in order to understand what asteroid morphologies should naturally arise from their formation and evolution process. In doing this, a phase diagram is developed that maps out the…
Surface charging phenomenon of asteroids, mainly resulting from solar wind plasma and solar radiation, has been studied extensively. However, the influence of asteroid's rotation on surface charging has yet to be fully understood. Here…
Remote sensing observations by Hayabusa2 and laboratory measurements have revealed that the phyllosilicates on asteroid (162173) Ryugu are dehydrated/dehydroxylated due to space weathering. Reactive molecular dynamics simulations were…
Extrasolar debris disks are detected by observing dust, which is thought to be released during planetesimal collisions. This implies that planetesimals are dynamically excited ("stirred"), such that collisions are sufficiently common and…
This paper presents a quantitative study of the evolution of the ejecta cloud released from a hypervelocity impact on a binary asteroid. We performed numerical simulations of the post-impact dynamics of the ejecta cloud in the framework of…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid is an indicator of the thermophysical properties of the regolith and is determined by the size of grains on the surface. Previous thermophysical modeling studies of asteroids have identified or suggested…
Aims: The aim of this work is to gain a deeper insight into how much different aggregate types are affected by erosion. Especially, it is important to study the influence of the velocity of the impacting projectiles. We also want to provide…
The current model of planet formation lacks a good understanding of the growth of dust particles inside the protoplanetary disk beyond mm sizes. In order to investigate the low-velocity collisions between this type of particles, the…
Irregular satellites are the minor bodies found orbiting all four Solar System giant planets, with large semi-major axes, eccentricities, and inclinations. Previous studies have determined that the Solar System's irregular satellites are…