Related papers: Model for Asteroid Regolith to Guide Simulant Deve…
Near-Earth small-body mission targets 162173 Ryugu, 101955 Bennu, and 25143 Itokawa produce gravity fields around 4 orders of magnitude below that of Earth and their irregular shapes, combined with rotational effects produce varying surface…
We present the modeling results of the thermal lightcurve of asteroid (3) Juno at the wavelength of $\lambda$ = 1.3 mm measured by the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array. A thermophysical model together with a radiative transfer…
China plans to return samples from the near-Earth asteroid (469219) Kamo'oalewa, which we previously identified as an LL-chondrite-compositional, highly space-weathered object with fine-grained regolith. In this study, we developed 10 mL of…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
Current spacecraft need to launch with all of their required fuel for travel. This limits the system performance, payload capacity, and mission flexibility. One compelling alternative is to perform In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) by…
Recent space missions have provided substantial evidence of regolith movement on the surfaces of near Earth asteroids. To investigate this phenomenon, we present a continuum-based model that describes regolith motion on nearly spherical…
The regolith-covered surfaces of asteroids preserve records of geophysical processes that have occurred both at their surfaces and sometimes also in their interiors. As a result of the unique micro-gravity environment that these bodies…
China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft will return samples from the near-Earth asteroid (469219) Kamo'oalewa. We previously reported that Kamo'oalewa develops an LL-chondrite-compositional, highly space-weathered surface. This study aims to estimate…
The tangential YORP effect is a radiation pressure torque produced by asymmetric thermal emission by structures on the asteroid surface. As such structures, previous works considered boulders of different shapes lying on the surface of the…
During its year-long orbital mission, the Dawn spacecraft has mapped the surface of main-belt asteroid Vesta multiple times at different spatial resolutions and illumination and viewing angles. The onboard Framing Camera has acquired…
The compression property of regolith reflects the strength and porosity of the regolith layer on small bodies and their variations in the layer that largely influence the collisional and thermal evolution of the bodies. We conducted…
The field of asteroid thermophysical modeling has experienced an extraordinary growth in the last ten years, as new thermal infrared data became available for hundreds of thousands of asteroids. The infrared emission of asteroids depends on…
(704) Interamnia is one of the largest asteroids that locates in the outer main-belt region, which may contain a large amount of water ice underneath its surface. We observe this asteroid using 8.2 m Subaru telescope at mid-infrared…
The surfaces of many planetary bodies, including asteroids and small moons, are covered with dust to pebble-sized regolith held weakly to the surface by gravity and contact forces. Understanding the reaction of regolith to an external…
Asteroids that are targets of spacecraft missions are interesting because they present us with an opportunity to validate ground-based spectral observations. One such object is near-Earth asteroid (NEA) (162173) Ryugu, which is the target…
All atmosphere-less planetary bodies are covered with a dust layer, the so-called regolith, which determines the optical, mechanical and thermal properties of their surface. These properties depend on the regolith material, the size…
On 24 September 2023, the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission dropped a capsule to Earth containing approximately 120 g of pristine carbonaceous regolith from Bennu. We describe the delivery and initial allocation of this asteroid sample and introduce…
Context. Upcoming space missions will provide us with surface-resolved NEA reflectance spectra. Neural networks are useful tools for analysing reflectance spectra and determining material composition with high precision and low processing…
Characterizing the surface material of an asteroid is important for understanding its geology and for informing mission decisions, such as the selection of a sample site. Diurnal surface temperature amplitudes are directly related to the…
This article investigates reconstructing the internal mass density of a numerical asteroid model using the gradient of a simulated gravity field as synthetic measurement data. Our goal is to advance the mathematical inversion methodology…