Related papers: Development of Techniques Enabling Suborbital Smal…

We derive purely gravitational constraints on dark matter and cosmic neutrino profiles in the solar system using asteroid (101955) Bennu. We focus on Bennu because of its extensive tracking data and high-fidelity trajectory modeling…

The Hayabusa2 extended mission, nicknamed Hayabusa2# (# is pronounced SHARP, which stands for the Small Hazardous Asteroid Reconnaissance Probe), is JAXA's small body explorer to conduct science and engineering investigations in space.…

On 24 September 2023, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) Sample Return Capsule entered the Earth's atmosphere after successfully collecting samples from an asteroid.…

The JAXA Hayabusa-2 mission was approved in 2010 and launched on December 3, 2014. The spacecraft will arrive at the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2018 where it will perform a survey, land and obtain surface material, then depart in…

In studies of the oldest solar system bodies - comets and asteroids - it is their fragments - meteoroids - that provide the most accessible planetary material for detailed laboratory analysis in the form of dust particles or meteorites.…

We present a new technique for observing low energy neutrinos with the aim of detecting the cosmic neutrino background using ion storage rings. Utilising high energy targets exploits the quadratic increase in the neutrino capture cross…

Spin off events and impacts can eject boulders from an asteroid surface and rubble pile asteroids can accumulate from debris following a collision between large asteroids. These processes produce a population of gravitational bound objects…

Granular material that is bound by the low gravity of a small asteroid is mobilized by slow velocity impacts. These splashes generated by impacts might play an important role in sculpting the asteroid's surface. In laboratory experiments we…

JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission successfully returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in December 2020. It executed two touchdowns to collect the surface and subsurface materials, one close to the crater created by an artificial impactor. The…

Motivated by recent visits from interstellar comets, along with continuing discoveries of minor bodies in orbit of the Sun, this paper studies the capture of objects on initially hyperbolic orbits by our solar system. Using an ensemble of…

Resonance capture is studied numerically in the three-body problem for arbitrary inclinations. Massless particles are set to drift from outside the 1:5 resonance with a Jupiter-mass planet thereby encountering the web of the planet's…

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…

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…

The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…

The NASA mission OSIRIS-REx has been observing near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu in close proximity since December 2018. In this work, we investigate spectral phase reddening -- that is, the variation of spectral slope with phase angle --…

We present a method for calculating precise distances to asteroids using only two nights of data from a single location --- far too little for an orbit --- by exploiting the angular reflex motion of the asteroids due to Earth's axial…

BEBOP is a radial-velocity survey that monitors a sample of single-lined eclipsing binaries, in search of circumbinary planets by using high-resolution spectrographs. Here, we describe and test the methods we use to identify planetary…

The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids often involves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. The final result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect to the…

The Kepler mission opened the door to a small but bonafide sample of circumbinary planets. Some initial trends have been identified and used to challenge our theories of planet and binary formation. However, the Kepler sample is not only…

The Hayabusa2 mission impact experiment on asteroid Ryugu created an unexpectedly large crater. The associated regime of low-gravity, low-strength cratering remained largely unexplored so far, because these impact conditions cannot be…