Related papers: Establishing Earth's Minimoon Population through C…

We present time-resolved visible spectrophotometry of minimoon 2020 CD$_3$, the second asteroid known to become temporarily captured by the Earth-Moon system's gravitational field. The spectrophotometry was taken with Keck I/LRIS between…

Any near-Earth object (NEO) following an Earth-like orbit may eventually be captured by Earth's gravity during low-velocity encounters. This theoretical possibility was first attested during the fly-by of 1991 VG in 1991-1992 with the…

(modified from published version) Twelve years ago the Catalina Sky Survey discovered Earth's first known natural geocentric object other than the Moon, a few-meter diameter asteroid designated 2006 RH120. Despite significant improvements…

This work examines the plausibility of a lunar origin of natural objects that have a negative total energy (ET) with respect to the geocenter while within 3 Earth Hill radii (RH), a population that we will refer to as 'bound'. They are a…

Minimoons are asteroids that become temporarily captured by the Earth-Moon system. We present the discovery of 2024 PT$_5$, a minimoon discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) Sutherland telescope on 2024…

We have for the first time calculated the population characteristics of the Earth's irregular natural satellites (NES) that are temporarily captured from the near-Earth-object (NEO) population. The steady-state NES size-frequency and…

This study examines the rotational characteristics of asteroids through statistical modeling of the diameter-period relationship. A statistical evaluation of the diameter-period relationship was conducted using a dataset of 34,326…

Asteroids with companions constitute an excellent sample for studying the collisional and dynamical evolution of minor planets. The currently known binary population were discovered by different complementary techniques that produce, for…

Context. The Arjuna asteroid belt is loosely defined as a diverse group of small asteroids that follow dynamically cold, Earth-like orbits. Most of them are not actively engaged in resonant, co-orbital behavior with Earth. Some of them…

We present lightcurve observations and their multiband photometry for near-Earth object (NEO) 2011 XA3. The lightcurve has shown a periodicity of 0.0304 +- 0.0003 day (= 43.8 +- 0.4 min). The fast rotation shows that 2011 XA3 is in a state…

We present a study on the discoverability of temporarily captured orbiters (TCOs) by present day or near-term anticipated ground-based and space-based facilities. TCOs (Granvik et al. 2012) are potential targets for spacecraft ren- dezvous…

Gaia Data Release 3 contains accurate photometric observations of more than 150,000 asteroids covering a time interval of 34 months. With a total of about 3,000,000 measurements, a typical number of observations per asteroid ranges from a…

We present an analysis of new and published data on P/2013 R3, the first asteroid detected while disintegrating. Thirteen discrete components are measured in the interval between UT 2013 October 01 and 2014 February 13. We determine a mean,…

Context. The near-Earth orbital space is shared by natural objects and space debris that can be temporarily captured in geocentric orbits. Short-term natural satellites are often called mini-moons. Reflectance spectroscopy can determine the…

After the discovery of rings around the largest known Centaur object, (10199) Chariklo, we carried out observation campaigns of stellar occultations produced by the second-largest known Centaur object, (2060) Chiron, to better characterize…

Objects gravitationally captured by the Earth-Moon system are commonly called temporarily captured orbiters (TCOs), natural Earth satellites, or minimoons. TCOs are a crucially important subpopulation of near-Earth objects (NEOs) to…

Physical studies of asteroids depend on an availability of lightcurve data. Targets that are easy to observe and analyse naturally have more data available, so their synodic periods are confirmed from multiple sources. Also, thanks to…

In this paper, a 3D convex shape model of (175706) 1996 FG3, which consists of 2040 triangle facets and 1022 vertices, is derived from the known lightcurves. The best-fit orientation of the asteroid's spin axis is determined to be $\lambda…

The population of large asteroids is thought to be primordial and they are the most direct witnesses of the early history of our Solar System. Those satellites allow study of the mass, and hence density and internal structure. We study here…

Using our photometric observations taken between 1996 and 2013 and other published data, we derived properties of the binary near-Earth asteroid (175706) 1996 FG3 including new measurements constraining evolution of the mutual orbit with…