Related papers: PI -- Multimodal Planetary Defense
Splitting by atomic bombs an asteroid in flight is the best way to deflect its trajectory. How and when it should be done is described.
The primary epoch of planetary accretion concludes with giant impacts - highly energetic collisions between proto-planets that can play a key role in shaping a planet's inventory of volatile elements. Previous work has shown that single…
Recent observations show that planet can reside in close binary systems with stellar separation of only about 20 AU. However, planet formation in such close binary systems is a challenge to current theory. One of the major theoretical…
Earth is constantly being bombarded with material from space. Most of the natural material end up being dust grains that litter the surface of Earth, but larger bodies are known to impact every few decades. The most recent large impact was…
The observed near-Earth asteroid population contains very few objects with small perihelion distances, say, q<=0.2 au. NEAs that currently have orbits with larger q might be hiding a past evolution during which they have approached closer…
We use a multiannulus accretion code to investigate debris disks in the terrestrial zone, at 0.7-1.3 AU around a 1 solar mass star. Terrestrial planet formation produces a bright dusty ring of debris with a lifetime of at least 1 Myr. The…
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
We considered the problem of stability for planets of finite mass in binary star systems. We selected a huge set of initial conditions for planetary orbits of the S-type, to perform high precision and very extended in time integrations. For…
We consider the possibility that aeolian (wind blown) processes occur on small, 1 to 100~km diameter, planetesimals when they were embedded in the protosolar nebula. Drag from a headwind within a protostellar disk is sufficiently large to…
Owing to the extensive application of infrared object detectors in the safety-critical tasks, it is necessary to evaluate their robustness against adversarial examples in the real world. However, current few physical infrared attacks are…
We investigate the long-term dynamical survival of Earth co-orbital asteroids, focusing on near-circular, near-planar orbits which existing studies suggest are the most stable. Through numerical integration of test particles we show that…
In models of planetary accretion, pebbles form by dust coagulation and rapidly migrate toward the central star. Planetesimals may continuously form from pebbles over the age of the protoplanetary disk by yet uncertain mechanisms. Meanwhile,…
Gravitational scattering of small bodies (planetesimals) by a planet remains a fundamental problem in celestial mechanics. It is traditionally modeled within the circular restricted three-body problem (CR3BP), where individual particle…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
The locations of the fully despun, double synchronous end states of tidal evolution are derived for spherical components. With the exception of nearly equal-mass binaries, binary asteroid systems are in the midst of lengthy tidal…
In Epoch 2 of the 2024 PDC25 Hypothetical Asteroid Impact Scenario, an asteroid is confirmed to be on a collision course with the Earth, and its size and surface composition have been well characterized via a flyby mission. A kinetic…
Radar and spacecraft observations show the permanently shadowed regions around Mercury's North Pole to contain water ice and complex organic material. One possible source of this material are impacts by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs),…
Planet formation begins with collisional growth of small planetesimals accumulating into larger ones. Such growth occurs while planetesimals are embedded in a gaseous protoplanetary disc. However, small-planetesimals experience collisions…
Estimates of the frequency of planetary systems in the Milky Way are observationally limited by the low-mass planet regime. Nevertheless, substantial evidence for systems with undetectably low planetary masses now exist in the form of…
In recent years, understanding asteroids has shifted from light worlds to geological worlds by exploring modern spacecraft and advanced radar and telescopic surveys. However, flyby in 2029 will be an opportunity to conduct an internal…