Related papers: Lunar impact craters identification and age estima…
We revisit the early evolution of the Moon's bombardment. Our work combines modeling (based on plausible projectile sources and their dynamical decay rates) with constraints from the lunar crater record, radiometric ages of the youngest…
It has been recently recognized that the surface of sub-km asteroids in contact with the space environment is not fine-grained regolith but consists of centimeter to meter-scale rocks. Here we aim to understand how the rocky morphology of…
The physical state of the lunar soil in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon is inferred from experimental investigation. The permanently shadowed craters do not undergo the same thermal cycling experienced by other parts of the…
This paper shows the application of autonomous Crater Detection using the U-Net, a Fully-Convolutional Neural Network, on Ceres. The U-Net is trained on optical images of the Moon Global Morphology Mosaic based on data collected by the LRO…
Are Saturn's regular satellites young or old? And how old are Enceladus' cratered plains? To answer these questions we computed model surface ages of the most heavily cratered terrains on Saturn's regular icy satellites using new…
We perform a comprehensive analysis of lunar impact flash (LIF) light curve shapes and their dependence on the lunar terrain, using the large sample of LIFs detected by NELIOTA over the last 9 years. We classified 124 multi-frame light…
Ceres, the dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt, hosts heavily cratered surfaces where craters are continuously eroded mainly due to impact bombardment with a limited influence by non-impact processes. Over continuous bombardment, such…
Crater count equilibrium occurs when new craters form at the same rate that old craters are erased, such that the total number of observable impacts remains constant. Despite substantial efforts to understand this process, there remain many…
We formulate the lunar cratering distribution and verify the cratering asymmetries generated by the main-belt asteroids (MBAs) as well as the near-Earth objects (NEOs). Based on a planar model that excludes the terrestrial and lunar…
The lunar geological record has much to tell us about the earliest history of the Solar System, the origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, the geological evolution of rocky planets, and the near-Earth cosmic environment throughout…
Impact flashes on the moon are caused by high-speed collisions of celestial bodies with the lunar surface. The study of the impacts is critical for exploring the evolutionary history and formation of the Moon, and for quantifying the risk…
It has been hypothesized that the impactors that created the majority of the observable craters on the ancient lunar highlands were derived from the main asteroid belt in such a way that preserved their size-frequency distribution. A more…
The Lunar landing has drawn great interest in lunar exploration in recent years, and autonomous lunar landing navigation is fundamental to this task. AI is expected to play a critical role in autonomous and intelligent space missions, yet…
The Giant Impact is currently accepted as the leading theory for the formation of Earth's Moon. Successful scenarios for lunar origin should be able to explain the chemical composition of the Moon (volatile content and stable isotope…
The importance of highly siderophile elements (HSEs) to track planetary late accretion has long been recognized. However, the precise nature of the Moon's accretional history remains enigmatic. There exists a significant mismatch of HSE…
Impact craters are formed due to continuous impacts on the surface of planetary bodies. Most recent deep learning-based crater detection methods treat craters as circular shapes, and less attention is paid to extracting the exact shapes of…
Optical navigation is a critical component for lunar orbiter and lander missions. Image-based crater identification has emerged as a promising technology for optical navigation due to the abundance of craters on the lunar surface and the…
The evolution of the lunar magnetic field can reveal the Moon's interior structure, thermal history, and surface environment. The mid-to-late stage evolution of the lunar magnetic field is poorly constrained, and thus the existence of a…
One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of…
Despite numerous attempts, no exomoon has firmly been confirmed to date. New missions like CHEOPS aim to characterize previously detected exoplanets, and potentially to discover exomoons. In order to optimize search strategies, we need to…