Related papers: Small Solar System Bodies as granular media
Planetary satellites are an integral part of the heirarchy of planetary systems. Here we make two predictions concerning their formation. First, primordial satellites, which have an array of distinguishing characteristics, form only around…
Context. The populations of small bodies of the Solar System (asteroids, comets, Kuiper-Belt objects) are used to constrain the origin and evolution of the Solar System. Both their orbital distribution and composition distribution are…
The origin of the regular satellites ties directly to planetary formation in that the satellites form in gas and dust disks around the giant planets and may be viewed as mini-solar systems, involving a number of closely related underlying…
Stars and planets can be seen as the second fundamental building blocks of baryons in the universe (only second to the dust and gas in molecular clouds). Their formation involves dust grain growth of many orders of magnitude and a myriad of…
Binary asteroid formation is a highly complex process, which has been highlighted with recent observations of satellites with unexpected shapes, such as the oblate Dimorphos by the NASA DART mission and the contact binary Selam by NASA's…
Observed hyperbolic minor bodies might have an interstellar origin, but they can be natives of the Solar system as well. Fly-bys with the known planets or the Sun may result in the hyperbolic ejection of an originally bound minor body; in…
Imaging and resolved spectroscopy reveal varying environmental conditions in our dynamic solar system. Many key advances have focused on how these conditions change over time. Observatory-level commitments to conduct annual observations of…
Didymos and Dimorphos are primary and secondary, respectively, asteroids who compose a binary system that make up the set of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). They are targets of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the first test…
Recently, Near Earth Objects (NEOs) have been attracting great attention, and thousands of NEOs have been found to date. This paper examines the NEOs' orbital dynamics using the framework of an accurate solar system model and a…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
In this paper we present the "Small Bodies: Near and Far" Infrared Database, an easy-to-use tool intended to facilitate the modeling of thermal emission of small Solar System bodies. Our database collects thermal emission measurements of…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
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…
The problem of origin and age of asteroid families is studied very intensively. First of all youngest families are interesting due to possibility of the reconstruction their collisional history. But in oldest families present objects with…
Space debris larger than 1 cm can damage space instruments and impact Earth. The low-Earth orbits (at heights smaller than 2000 km) and orbits near the geostationary- Earth orbit (at 35786 km height) are especially endangered, because most…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
CASTAway is a mission concept to explore our Solar System's main asteroid belt. Asteroids and comets provide a window into the formation and evolution of our Solar System and the composition of these objects can be inferred from space-based…
In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…