Related papers: Model for Asteroid Regolith to Guide Simulant Deve…
NASA has developed a "Figure of Merit" method to grade the fidelity of lunar simulants for scientific and engineering purposes. Here we extend the method to grade asteroid simulants, both regolith and cobble variety, and we apply the method…
The two on-going sample return space missions, Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx are going to return to Earth asteroid regolith from the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. The two main processes that lead to regolith production are…
In situ observations of small asteroids show that surfaces covered by boulders and coarse terrain are frequent on such bodies. Regolith grain sizes have distributions on approximately mm and cm scales, and the behavior of such large grains…
The dusty regolith covering the surfaces of asteroids and planetary satellites differs in size, shape, and composition from terrestrial soil particles and is subject to very different environmental conditions. Experimental studies of the…
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…
We present a new method for the determination of the surface properties of airless bodies from measurements of the emitted infrared flux. Our approach uses machine learning techniques to train, validate, and test a neural network…
The distributions of size and chemical composition in the regolith on airless bodies provides clues to the evolution of the solar system. Recently, the regolith on asteroid (25143) Itokawa, visited by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft, was…
A model for the asteroid resurfacing by regolith convection is built to estimate its timescale. In the model, regolith convection is driven by the impact-induced global seismic shaking. The model consists of three steps: (i) intermittent…
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…
Asteroid surfaces are subjected to mechanical weathering processes that result in the development and evolution of regolith. Two proposed mechanisms--impact bombardment and thermal fatigue--have been proposed as viable and dominant…
Despite their very low surface gravities, the surfaces of asteroids and comets are covered by granular materials - regolith - that can range from a fine dust to a gravel-like structure of varying depths. Understanding the dynamics of…
This study is carried out in the framework of sample-return missions to asteroids that use a low-speed projectile as the primary component of its sampling mechanism (e.g., JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions). We perform numerical…
We present recent improvements in the simulation of regolith sampling processes in microgravity using the numerical particle method smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH). We use an elastic-plastic soil constitutive model for large deformation…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid's surface can provide insight into regolith properties, such as the presence of a layer of fine dust, the density and thermal conductivity of a rocky surface, and, together with other observational data,…
Owing to the extremely low gravity of small near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), it has been assumed that impact-generated rock fragments escape into space and thus do not contribute to the accumulation of regolith. However, centimeter-sized stones…
The near-Earth asteroid (25143) Itokawa was characterised in great detail by the Japanese Hayabusa mission. We revisited the available thermal observations in the light of the true asteroid properties with the goal to evaluate the…
This paper studies the long-term migration of disturbed regolith materials on the surface of Solar System small bodies from the viewpoint of nonlinear dynamics. We propose an approximation model for secular mass movement, which combines the…
By means of a varied-shape thermophysical model (VS-TPM) of Hanus et al. (2015) that takes into account asteroid shape and pole uncertainties, we analyze the thermal IR data acquired by the NASA's WISE satellite of about 300 asteroids with…
The migration of cohesive regolith on the surface of an otherwise monolithic or strong asteroid is studied using theoretical and simulation models. The theory and simulations show that under an increasing spin rate (such as due to the YORP…
Porosity is a key characteristic of the regolith on the surface of small bodies. The porosity of the regolith on the surface of asteroids is changed by applied pressure, and the relationship between pressure and porosity depends on the…