Related papers: Development and Testing of an Engineering Model fo…
There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions in the Main Belt. They are diverse in physical properties and composition and are time capsules of the early solar system. This makes them strategic locations for planetary…
The study of the last stages of planet formation, also known as debris disks, is fundamental to place constrains on the formation of planetary sized bodies. Debris disks are composed of dust and occasionally small amounts of gas, both…
The primary scientific objective of this Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) Science Case Development Document (SCDD) is to measure planetary rotation rates of transiting exoplanets to determine the structure, composition, circulation, and…
Understanding the physics of small bodies such as asteroids, comets, and planetary moons will help us understand the formation of the solar system, and also provide us with resources for a future space economy. Due to these reasons,…
As part of a national scientific network 'Pathways to Habitability' the formation of planets and the delivery of water onto these planets is a key question as water is essential for the development of life. In the first part of the paper we…
Asteroid restructuring uses robotics, self replication, and mechanical automatons to autonomously restructure an asteroid into a large rotating space station. The restructuring process makes structures from asteroid oxide materials; uses…
The exploration of small bodies in the Solar System is a high priority planetary science. Asteroids, comets, and planetary moons yield important information about the evolution of the Solar System. Additionally, they could provide resources…
Space-based experiments today can uniquely address important questions related to the fundamental laws of Nature. In particular, high-accuracy physics experiments in space can test relativistic gravity and probe the physics beyond the…
Planetary rings are the only nearby astrophysical disks, and the only disks that have been investigated by spacecraft. Although there are significant differences between rings and other disks, chiefly the large planet/ring mass ratio that…
Large and publicly available astronomical archives open up new possibilities to search and study Solar System objects. However, advanced techniques are required to deal with the large amounts of data. These unbiased surveys can be used to…
Planetary embryos are built through the collisional growth of 10-100 km sized objects called planetesimals, a formerly large population of objects, of which asteroids, comets and Kuiper-Belt objects represent the leftovers from planet…
Construction of the precise shape of an asteroid is critical for spacecraft operations as the gravitational potential is determined by spatial mass distribution. The typical approach to shape determination requires a prolonged mapping phase…
Experimental analysis of the mechanics of a deformable object, and particularly its stability, requires repetitive testing and, depending on the complexity of the object's shape, a testing setup that can manipulate many degrees of freedom…
We will discuss some specific applications to the rotation state and the shapes of moderately large asteroids, and techniques of observations putting some emphasis on the HST/FGS instrument.
Most detected planet-bearing binaries are in wide orbits, for which a high inclination, $i_B$, between the binary orbital plane and the plane of the planetary disk around the primary is likely to be common. In this paper, we investigate the…
The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization will be retrieval of planetary albedos and rotation rates from highly…
The Hubble Space Telescope is uniquely able to study planets that are observed to transit their parent stars. The extremely stable platform afforded by an orbiting spacecraft, free from the contaminating effects of the Earth's atmosphere,…
The formation of planetesimals is often accredited to collisional sticking of dust grains. The exact process is unknown, as collisions between larger aggregates tend to lead to fragmentation or bouncing rather than sticking. Recent…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
The knowledge of the orbit or the ephemeris uncertainty of asteroid presents a particular interest for various purposes. These quantities are for instance useful for recovering asteroids, for identifying lost asteroids or for planning…