Related papers: Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon and Terrain Age…
The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…
In this paper we present a crater age determination of several terrains associated with the Raditladi and Rachmaninoff basins. These basins were discovered during the first and third MESSENGER flybys of Mercury, respectively. One of the…
Centaurs are solar system objects with orbits situated among the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Centaurs represent one of the sources of Near-Earth Objects. Thus, it is crucial to understand their orbital evolution which in some cases might…
Compared to the giant planets in the solar system, exoplanets have many remarkable properties such as the prevalence of giant planets on eccentric orbits and the presence of hot Jupiters. Planet-planet scattering (PPS) between giant planets…
We present a new crater chronology for Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. This tool can be used to interpret the collisional history of the bodies observed by NASA's Lucy mission. The Lucy mission will visit a total of six Trojan asteroids:…
The decay of the martian atmosphere - which is dominated by carbon dioxide - is a component of the long-term environmental change on Mars from a climate that once allowed rivers to flow to the cold and dry conditions of today. The minimum…
An incident fast ion in the electronic stopping regime produces a track of excitations which can lead to particle ejection and cratering. Molecular Dynamics simulations of the evolution of the deposited energy were used to study the…
A giant collision is believed to be at the origin of the Pluto-Charon system. As a result, the initial orbit and spins after impact may have substantially differed from those observed today. More precisely, the distance at periapse may have…
This study explores the gravitational interaction between Pluto and its moon Charon, which has led to their synchronous orbit, where they consistently show the same face to each other. This process is known as tidal evolution, which…
Observations of the Pluto-Charon system, acquired with the ALMA interferometer on June 12-13, 2015, have yielded a detection of the CO(3-2) and HCN(4-3) rotational transitions from Pluto, providing a strong confirmation of the presence of…
We have measured the solar phase curves in B, V, and I for 18 Trans-Neptunian Objects, 7 Centaurs, and Nereid and determined the rotation curves for 10 of these targets. For each body, we have made ~100 observations uniformly spread over…
The erosion of lunar soil by rocket exhaust plumes is investigated experimentally. This has identified the diffusion-driven flow in the bulk of the sand as an important but previously unrecognized mechanism for erosion dynamics. It has also…
Penitentes are ablative features observed in snow and ice that, on Earth, are characterized by regular cm to tens of cm spaced bowl-shaped depressions whose edges grade into tall spires up to several meters tall (Nichols et al. 1939,…
Circular Polarisation Ratio (CPR) mosaics from Mini-SAR on Chandrayaan-1 and Mini-RF on LRO are used to study craters near to the lunar north pole. The look direction of the detectors strongly affects the appearance of the crater CPR maps.…
Planetary impact events eject large volumes of surface material. Crater excavation processes are difficult to study, and in particular the details of individual ejecta fragments are not well understood. A related, enduring issue in…
On Mars, fields of sand dunes contrast with the general cratered, rocky terrain commonly seen from orbit. Near the equator, in Gale Crater, images from the rover, Curiosity, also reveal order on smaller scales: ripples on dunes, and ground…
The orbits of Pluto's four small satellites (Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra) are nearly circular and coplanar with the orbit of the large satellite Charon, with orbital periods nearly in the ratios 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, and 6:1 with Charon's…
Most of Mars' ancient sedimentary rocks by volume are in wind-eroded sedimentary mounds, but the connections between mound form and wind erosion are unclear. We perform mesoscale simulations of different crater and mound morphologies to…
Sputnik Planitia, Pluto's gigantic ice glacier, hosts numerous scientific mysteries, including the presence of thousands of elongated pit structures. We examine various attributes of these pit structures in New Horizons data sets, revealing…
We analyze two multi-chord stellar occultations by Pluto observed on July 18th, 2012 and May 4th, 2013, and monitored respectively from five and six sites. They provide a total of fifteen light-curves, twelve of them being used for a…