Related papers: Study of the asteroid Bennu using geodesyANNs and …
OSIRIS-REx is the third spacecraft in the NASA New Frontiers Program and is planned for launch in 2016. OSIRIS-REx will orbit the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu, characterize it, and return a sample of the asteroid's regolith back to…
Context. Binary asteroids are present in all populations of the Solar System, from near-Earth to trans-Neptunian regions. As is true for the small Solar System bodies (SSSBs), binary asteroids generally offer valuable insights into the…
We aim to understand how landslides affect the shape and rotational motion of small rubble planetary bodies. We limit ourselves to axisymmetric global landslides, and take the primordial shape of the body to also be axisymmetric. The…
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 --…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been successfully used in the last years to identify patterns in astronomical images. The use of ANN in the field of asteroid dynamics has been, however, so far somewhat limited. In this work we used…
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 a new method for the determination of the surface properties of airless bodies from measurements of the emitted infrared flux. Our approach uses machine learning techniques to train, validate, and test a neural network…
The orbital distributions of dust particles in interplanetary space are inferred from several meteoroid data sets under the constraints imposed by the orbital evolution of the particles due to the planetary gravity and Poynting-Robertson…
The rotational properties of small near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) provide crucial insights into their internal structure and collisional history. However, systematic surveys targeting metre- to decametre-sized bodies are rare, thus leaving…
Using multidirectional measurements from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we investigated the viability of determining the approximate shape and spin axis orientations for 44 selected main belt asteroids, using light curve…
The research about asteroids attracts more and more attention recently, especially focusing on their physical structures, such as the spin axis, the rotation period and the shape. The long distance between Earth observers and asteroids…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid's surface can provide insight into regolith properties, such as the presence of a layer of fine dust, the density and thermal conductivity of a rocky surface, and, together with other observational data,…
The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived at its target, near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, in December 2018. After one year of operating in proximity, the…
The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission is investigating primitive near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu. Thousands of images will be acquired by the MapCam instrument onboard the spacecraft, an imager with four color filters based on…
This study aims to establish an analytical model that reproduces the gravitational field around non-spherical bodies with constant density. Due to the non-spherical geometry of such bodies, their gravitational potential is disturbed…
Classifying potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) is crucial for planetary defense and deep space navigation, yet traditional methods often overlook the dynamical relationships among asteroids. We introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)…
In order to fully understand the shapes of asteroids families in the 3-dimensional space of the proper elements $(a_{\rm p}, e_{\rm p}, \sin I_{\rm p})$ it is necessary to compare observed asteroids with N-body simulations. To this point,…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
The bulk density of an asteroid informs us about its interior structure and composition. To constrain the bulk density one needs an estimate for the mass of the asteroid. The mass is estimated by analyzing an asteroid's gravitational…