Related papers: Lunar impact craters identification and age estima…
The leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, that of a single giant impact, faces significant challenges. These include either the need for an impactor with a near-identical composition to Earth or an extremely high-mass or…
Current lunar origin scenarios suggest that Earth's Moon may have resulted from the merger of two (or more) smaller moonlets. Dynamical studies of multiple moons find that these satellite systems are not stable, resulting in moonlet…
The planetary differentiation models of Mars are proposed that take into account core-mantle and core-mantle-crust differentiation. The numerical simulations are presented for the early thermal evolution of Mars spanning up to the initial…
The Moon has suffered intense impact bombardment ending at 3.9 Gyr ago, and this bombardment probably affected all of the inner Solar System. Basin magnetization signatures and lunar crater size-distributions indicate that the last episode…
After 25 years of the prediction of the possibility of observations, and despite the many hundreds of well studied transiting exoplanet systems, we are still waiting for the announcement of the first confirmed exomoon. We follow the…
To simulate the heated exterior of a meteorite, we impact a granular bed with melted tin. The morphology of tin remnant and crater is found to be sensitive to the temperature and solidification of tin. By employing deep learning and…
The study of meter and sub-meter scale geological features, especially boulders and boulder fields, on the surface of airless bodies can provide insight into the evolution of the regolith and the contribution of various processes to its…
Crystallization of the lunar magma ocean yielded a chemically unique liquid residuum named KREEP. This component is expressed as a large patch on the near side of the Moon, and a possible smaller patch in the northwest portion of the Moon's…
In the companion paper ("Erosion rate of lunar soil under a landing rocket, part 1: identifying the rate-limiting physics", this issue) an equation was developed for the rate that lunar soil erodes under the exhaust of a landing rocket.…
The population of natural objects in a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth are known as Earth's co-orbitals. Main belt objects can dynamically evolve into Earth co-orbitals but taxonomic studies of some of them have suggested that they are…
Most detected transiting planets have orbits which would fit within the one of Mercury, exposing them to intense stellar irradiation and interactions that significantly alter their properties. In contrast, colder planets with longer orbital…
The efficiency of regolith production is key in understanding the properties of airless surfaces. Debris aprons, of fillets, around rocks are an ubiquitous morphology on many surfaces without atmosphere, which origin and evolution are…
Crater-Based Navigation (CBN) uses the ubiquitous impact craters of the Moon observed on images as natural landmarks to determine the six degrees of freedom pose of a spacecraft. To date, CBN has primarily been studied in the context of…
We model the primary crater production of small (D < 100 m) primary craters on Mars and the Moon using the observed annual flux of terrestrial fireballs. From the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of meteor diameters, with appropriate…
Model Production Function chronology uses dynamic models of the Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs) and Near Earth Objects (NEOs) to derive the impactor flux to a target body. This is converted into the crater size-frequency-distribution for a…
The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed by an impact between the Earth and an impactor around 4.5 billion years ago. This impact could have been so energetic that it could have mixed and homogenized the Earth's mantle. However, this view…
The proposed multi-impact model explains the formation of the Moon, Charon, and binary asteroids without invoking catastrophic cosmic events. The main elements of the new model are as follows: a. A primordial, low-mass proto-satellite disk…
We are preparing a telescope system to carry out a survey of detection and analysis of lunar impact flashes. In the framework of this project, here we present all necessary methods to automatically identify these luminous events, their…
The number of known transiting exoplanets is rapidly increasing, which has recently inspired significant interest as to whether they can host a detectable moon. Although there has been no such example where the presence of a satellite was…
Numerous missions planned for the next decade are likely to target a handful of smal sites of interest on the Moon's surface, creating risks of crowding and interference at these locations. The Moon presents finite and scarce areas with…