Related papers: The Global Surface Roughness of 25143 Itokawa
When creating asteroid regolith simulant, it is necessary to have a model of asteroid regolith to guide and to evaluate the simulant. We created a model through evaluation and synthesis of the available data sets including (1) the returned…
We present a framework to study regolith segregation on rubble-pile asteroids (self-gravitating granular aggregates) due to seismic shaking induced by impacts sustained during their lifetimes. We first relate the amplitude and frequency of…
The 99942 Apophis close encounter with Earth in 2029 may provide information about asteroid's physical characteristics and measurements of Earth's effects on the asteroid surface. In this work, we analysed the surface and the nearby…
We develop a simple model, in the spirit of the Asakura-Oosawa theory, able to describe the effects of surface roughness on the depletion potential as a function of a small set of parameters. The resulting explicit expressions are easily…
We derive the geometric albedo of a near-Earth asteroid, (4179) Toutatis, to investigate its surface physical conditions. The asteroid has been studied rigorously not only via ground-based photometric, spectrometric, polarimetric, and radar…
In this work, we investigate the surface thermophysical properties (thermal emissivity, thermal inertia, roughness fraction and geometric albedo) of asteroid (99942) Apophis, using the currently available thermal infrared observations of…
Context. Tangential YORP is a thermophysical effect that can alter the rotation rate of asteroids and is distinct from the "normal" YORP effect, but to date has only been studied for asteroids with zero obliquity. Aims. The tangential YORP…
The Hayabusa spacecraft rendezvoused with its target asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2005 and brought an asteroidal sample back to the Earth in 2010. The onboard camera, AMICA, took more than 1400 images of Itokawa during the rendezvous phase. It…
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…
The YORP effect is a small thermal-radiation torque experienced by small asteroids, and is considered to be crucial in their physical and dynamical evolution. It is important to understand this effect by providing measurements of YORP for a…
This paper considers the coupled orbit and attitude dynamics of a dumbbell spacecraft around an asteroid. Geometric methods are used to derive the coupled equations of motion, defined on the configuration space of the special Euclidean…
The dark asteroid (101955) Bennu studied by NASA\textquoteright s OSIRIS-REx mission has a boulder-rich and apparently dust-poor surface, providing a natural laboratory to investigate the role of single-scattering processes in rough…
Asteroid (162173) Ryugu is the target object of Hayabusa2, an asteroid exploration and sample return mission led by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Ground-based observations indicate that Ryugu is a C-type near-Earth asteroid…
The rotation states of small asteroids are affected by a net torque arising from an anisotropic sunlight reflection and thermal radiation from the asteroids' surfaces. On long timescales, this so-called YORP effect can change asteroid spin…
Close to the Roche radius of a white dwarf (WD), an asteroid on a circular orbit sheds material that then adopts a very similar orbit. Observations of the resulting debris show a periodic behavior and changes in flux on short timescales,…
Surface shedding of an asteroid is a failure mode where surface materials fly off due to strong centrifugal forces beyond the critical spin period, while the internal structure does not deform significantly. This paper proposes a possible…
The timescales over which the YORP effect alters the rotation period and the obliquity of a small asteroid can be very different, because the corresponding torques couple to different aspects of the object's shape. For nearly axisymmetric,…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
We present a physical model and spin-state analysis of the potentially hazardous asteroid (23187) 2000 PN9. As part of a long-term campaign to make direct detections of the YORP effect, we collected optical lightcurves of the asteroid…
We present our investigations of the physical and dynamical properties of selected Earth co-orbital asteroids. The photometric optical light curves as well as rotation periods and pole solutions for a sample of four Earth co-orbital…