Related papers: Study of the asteroid Bennu using geodesyANNs and …
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
Time-resolved photometry of asteroids can be used for shape and spin reconstruction. If the number of measurements per asteroid is not sufficient to create a model, the whole data set can be used to reconstruct the distribution of shape…
The asteroidal main belt is crossed by a web of mean-motion and secular resonances, that occur when there is a commensurability between fundamental frequencies of the asteroids and planets. Traditionally, these objects were identified by…
Understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroids through the secular Yarkovsky effect requires the determination of many physical properties, including the rotation period. We propose a method aimed at obtaining a robust determination of…
Dynamical mass estimates for the main asteroid belt and the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt have been found from their gravitational influence on the motion of planets. Discrete rotating models consisting of moving material points have been…
OSIRIS-REx, NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, rendezvoused with the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2018 and delivered a 121.6-gram sample to Earth in 2023, the largest amount of material ever recovered from a planetary body beyond…
Given the compositional diversity of asteroids, and their distribution in space, it is impossible to consider returning samples from each one to establish their origin. However, the velocity and molecular composition of primary minerals,…
Relevant information about physical properties of the surface of airless bodies such as porosity, particle size, or roughness can be inferred knowing the dependence of the brightness with illumination and observing geometry. Additionally,…
Mean motion resonances play a fundamental role in the dynamics of the small bodies of the Solar System. The last decades of the 20th century gave us a detailed description of the dynamics as well as the process of capture of small bodies in…
Context: Large all-sky surveys provide us with a lot of photometric data that are sparse in time (typically few measurements per night) and can be potentially used for the determination of shapes and rotational states of asteroids. The…
Exploration of asteroids and comets can give insight into the origins of the solar system and can be instrumental in planetary defence and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Asteroids, due to their low gravity are a challenging target for…
In general, small bodies of the solar system, e.g., asteroids and comets, have a very irregular shape. This feature affects significantly the gravitational potential around these irregular bodies, which hinders dynamical studies. The…
Asteroid shapes and satellites: role of gravitational reaccumulation. Following current evidences, it is widely accepted that many asteroids would be "gravitational aggregates", i.e. bodies lacking internal cohesion. They could mainly be…
Accurately predicting eclipse events around irregular small bodies is crucial for spacecraft navigation, orbit determination, and spacecraft systems management. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging neural implicit…
The masses and radii of extrasolar planets are key observables for understanding their interior, formation and evolution. While transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy are used to measure the radii and masses respectively of planets…
Mass and radius of planets transiting their host stars are provided by radial velocity and photometric observations. Structural models of solid exoplanet interiors are then constructed by using equations of state for the radial density…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
Knowledge of the interior density distribution of an asteroid can reveal its composition and constrain its evolutionary history. However, most asteroid observational techniques are not sensitive to interior properties. We investigate the…
Context. A lot of photometric data is produced by surveys such as Pan-STARRS, LONEOS, WISE or Catalina. These data are a rich source of information about the physical properties of asteroids. There are several possible approaches for…