Related papers: First approximation for spacecraft motion relative…
Didymos is a binary near-Earth asteroid. It is the target of the DART and HERA space missions. The primary body, Didymos, rotates close to the spin at which it is expected to shed mass. The secondary body, Dimorphos, is a 140 meters moon…
Purpose: This paper presents a full fourth-order model of the gravity gradient torque of spacecraft around asteroids by taking into consideration of the inertia integrals of the spacecraft up to the fourth order, which is an improvement of…
Analytical approximations are commonly employed in the initial trajectory design phase of a mission to rapidly explore a broad design space. In the context of an asteroid deflection mission, accurately predicting deflection is crucial to…
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…
We study the time-like geodesic congruences, in the space-time geometry of a Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by quintessence. The nature of effective potential along with the structure of the possible orbits for test particles in view…
Despite numerous successful missions to small celestial bodies, the gravity field of such targets has been poorly characterized so far. Gravity estimates can be used to infer the internal structure and composition of small bodies and, as…
The four-spacecraft formation is essential for measurements of various physical fields. The use of this formation on substantially elliptical heliocentric Kepler orbits allows measuring gradients of gravitation field in Solar system. The…
Phase curves of asteroids are typically considered to depend solely on the scattering properties of airless particulate surfaces and the size of the object being studied. In this study, we demonstrate the additional dependence of phase…
Asteroid 2009 FD could impact Earth between 2185 and 2196. The long term propagation to the possible impacts and the intervening planetary encounters make 2009 FD one of the most challenging asteroids in terms of hazard assessment. To…
The plausibility of an unseen planet in the outer solar system, and the expected orbit and mass of such a planet, have long been a topic of inquiry and debate. We calculate the long-term orbital stability of distant TNOs, which allows us to…
The determination of the gravitational potential by the polyhedral method is revisited in the case where the surface of a body is composed of triangular facets. Based upon six test-shapes of astrophysical interest (sphere, spheroid,…
We use an extensive suite of numerical simulations to constrain the mass and orbit of Planet Nine, the recently proposed perturber in a distant eccentric orbit in the outer solar system. We compare our simulations to the observed population…
Asteroid binaries found amongst the Near-Earth objects are believed to have formed from rotational fission. In this paper, we aim to study the dynamical evolution of asteroid systems the moment after fission. The initial condition is…
While the number of asteroids with known shapes has drastically increased over the past few years, little is known on the the time-evolution of shapes and the underlying physical processes. Here we propose an averaged abrasion model based…
In asteroid rendezvous missions, the dynamical environment near the asteroid's surface should be made clear prior to the mission launch. However, most of the asteroids have irregular shapes, which lower the efficiency of calculating their…
The release of Gaia catalog is revolutionary to the astronomy of solar system objects. After some effects such as atmospheric refraction and CCD geometric distortion have been taken into account, the astrometric precision for ground-based…
This paper focuses on the attitude motion of spacecraft systems featuring asymmetric spacecraft platforms and unbalanced rotors. Through perturbation expansion, the spacecraft dynamic equation is simplified as a linear periodically…
Tetrahedral configurations of spacecraft on unperturbed heliocentric orbits allow for highly precise observations of small spatial changes in the gravitational field, especially those affecting the gravity gradient tensor (GGT). The…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
The science and origins of asteroids is deemed high priority in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Major scientific goals for the study of planetesimals are to decipher geological processes in SSSBs not determinable from investigation…