Related papers: Meteoroid Structure and Fragmentation
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,…
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
Understanding the collisional fragmentation and subsequent reaccumulation of fragments is crucial for studies of the formation and evolution of the small-body populations. Using an SPH / N-body approach, we investigate the size-frequency…
When a granular material is impacted by a sphere, its surface deforms like a liquid yet it preserves a circular crater like a solid. Although the mechanism of granular impact cratering by solid spheres is well explored, our knowledge on…
The distributions of size and chemical composition in the regolith on airless bodies provides clues to the evolution of the solar system. Recently, the regolith on asteroid (25143) Itokawa, visited by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft, was…
I present an overview of the hierarchy of structures existing in the interstellar medium (ISM) and the possible mechanisms that cause the fragmentation of one level into the next, with the formation of stars as its last step. Within this…
Meteorite craters on the asteroid surface obstruct the horizontal flow of solar wind, forming a plasma wake that modulates the particle fluxes and the electrostatic environment far downstream. In this study, surface charging properties of…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
Recent observations of asteroidal surfaces indicate the presence of materials that do not match the bulk lithology of the body. A possible explanation for the presence of these exogenous materials is that they are products of inter-asteroid…
Constraining the formation processes of small solar system bodies is crucial for gaining insights into planetesimal formation. Their bulk densities, determined by their compressive strengths, offer valuable information about their formation…
We show that dark-matter candidates with large masses and large nuclear interaction cross sections are detectable with terrestrial radar systems. We develop our results in close comparison to successful radar searches for tiny meteoroids,…
Comet disintegration proceeds both through sublimation and discrete splitting events. The cross-sectional area of material ejected by a comet may, within days, become many times greater than that of the Earth, making encounters with such…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
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…
The building blocks of life, amino acids and nucleobases, are believed to have been synthesized in the extreme conditions that prevail in space starting from simple molecules containing hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. However, the…
We analyzed spectra, trajectories, orbits, light curves, and decelerations of eight Draconid meteors observed from Northern Italy on October 8, 2011. Meteor morphologies of two of the meteors are also presented, one of them obtained with a…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
We show that if comets (or any small icy planetesimals such as Kuiper belt objects) are composed of pebble piles, their internal radiogenic as well as geochemical heating results in considerably different evolutionary outcomes compared to…
Chondritic meteorites, the building blocks of terrestrial planets, are made of an out-of-equilibrium assemblage of solids formed at high and low temperatures, either in our Solar system or previous generations of stars. This was considered…
The physics of Sunspots is a fascinating and demanding field of research in solar astronomy. Interaction of magnetic fields and plasma flows takes place in a tangled magnetic geometry and occurs on spatial scales that pose a continuous…