Related papers: DEM simulation of soil-tool interaction under extr…
The energetic particle environment on the Martian surface is influenced by solar and heliospheric modulation and changes in the local atmospheric pressure (or column depth). The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on board the Mars Science…
Planet-encircling dust storms fundamentally reshape Martian weather and the near-surface electrostatic environment. We investigate the generation and evolution of electric fields during global dust storms using bimodal dust size…
Boulders on the surfaces of planets, satellites and small bodies, as well as their geological associations, provide important information about surface processes. We analyzed all available images of the surface of Mercury that have…
Time-limited space missions may miss rare occurrences of very dense clouds of lunar dust. At the same time, the information provided by the Earth-based monitoring of the Moon during at least the last three centuries still remains unused. In…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…
Previously we presented a numerical model that predicts trajectories of lunar dust, soil, and gravel blown by the engine exhaust of a lunar lander. The model uses the gas density, velocity vector field, and temperature predicted by…
The orbital sampling effect (OSE) appears in phase-folded transit light curves of extrasolar planets with moons. Analytical OSE models have hitherto neglected stellar limb darkening and non-zero transit impact parameters and assumed that…
Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…
Surface roughness plays a crucial role in the accuracy of indentation experiments used to measure the elastic properties of materials. In this study, we present a computational analysis of how surface roughness, represented explicitly by…
Several detection strategies for wave-like dark matter make use of gradients in the dark matter field, e.g. searches for spin-dependent derivative interactions in CASPEr-wind or experiments looking for oscillating forces. These gradients…
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…
We have computed the surface energies, work functions, and interlayer surface relaxations of clean (111), (110), and (100) surfaces of Al, Cu, Ru, Rh, Pd, Ag, Pt, and Au. Many of these metallic surfaces have technological or catalytic…
Collisional charging is one potential initial step in generating lightning. In this work, we study the charging of colliding monodisperse, spherical basalt grains depending on ambient pressure. We used grains of 1.0 to 1.2 mm in one set and…
At low ambient pressure, temperature gradients in porous soil lead to a gas flow, called thermal creep. With this regard, Mars is a unique as the conditions for thermal creep to occur in natural soil only exist on this planet in the solar…
This paper presents the design and development of a Shear and Compression Cell (SCC) for measuring the mechanical properties of granular materials in low-gravity environments. This research is motivated by the increasing interest in…
This work investigates the macroscopic thermomechanical behavior of lunar boulders by modeling their response to diurnal thermal forcing. Our results reveal a bimodal, spatiotemporally-complex stress response. During sunrise, stresses occur…
With dozens of Jovian and super-Jovian exoplanets known to orbit their host stars in or near the stellar habitable zones, it has recently been suggested that moons the size of Mars could offer abundant surface habitats beyond the solar…
It is known that most of the craters on the surface of the Moon were created by the collision of minor bodies of the Solar System. Main Belt Asteroids, which can approach the terrestrial planets as a consequence of different types of…
A rigorous definition of the habitable zone and its dependence on planetary properties is part of the search for habitable exoplanets. In this work, we use the general circulation model ExoCAM to determine how the inner edge of the…
We study the implications of Planck data for models of dark energy (DE) and modified gravity (MG), beyond the cosmological constant scenario. We start with cases where the DE only directly affects the background evolution, considering…