Related papers: Painting Asteroids for Planetary Defense
The population of known minor bodies in retrograde orbits ($i > 90 ^{\circ}$) that are classified as asteroids is still growing. The aim of our study was to estimate the dynamical lifetimes of these bodies by use of the latest observational…
Thermal inertia determines the temperature distribution over the surface of an asteroid and therefore governs the magnitude the Yarkovsky effect. The latter causes gradual drifting of the orbits of km-sized asteroids and plays an important…
Knowledge of the surface thermal inertia of an asteroid can provide insight into surface structure: porous material has a lower thermal inertia than rock. We develop a means to estimate thermal inertia values of asteroids and use it to show…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…
The rotational state of asteroids is controlled by various physical mechanisms including collisions, internal damping and the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect. We have analysed the changes in magnitude between consecutive…
The subject of this work is the physical characterization of asteroids, focusing on the thermal inertia of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). Thermal inertia governs the Yarkovsky effect, a non-gravitational force which significantly alters the…
We have developed a theoretical description of how of an asteroid's polarization-phase curve will be affected by the removal of the dust from the surface due to a size-dependent phenomenon such as radiation pressure-driven escape of…
Earth is bombarded by meteors, occasionally by one large enough to cause a significant explosion and possible loss of life. Although the odds of a deadly asteroid strike in the next century are low, the most likely impact is by a relatively…
A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…
The Yarkovsky effect is a thermal process acting upon the orbits of small celestial bodies, which can cause these orbits to slowly expand or contract with time. The effect is subtle (da/dt ~ 10^-4 au/My for a 1 km diameter object) and is…
The Yarkovsky effect plays an important role in the motions of small celestial bodies. Increasingly improving observations bring the need of high-accuracy modelling of the effect. Using a multiphysics software COMSOL, we model the diurnal…
We numerically investigate how an asteroid's elongation controls the sensitivity of its surface to tidal effects during a distant planetary encounter beyond the Roche limit. We analyze the surface slope and its variation by considering the…
Asteroids smaller than about 100 meters are observed to rotate very fast, with periods often much shorter than the critical limit of 2.2 h. Some of these super-fast rotators can also achieve a very large semi-major axis drift induced by the…
Effects of solar wind and solar electromagnetic radiation on motion of asteroids are discussed. The results complete the statements presented in Vokrouhlick\'{y} and Milani (2000). As for the effect of electromagnetic radiation, the…
The Asteroid Tugboat (AT) is a fully controlled asteroid deflection concept using a robotic spacecraft powered by a high efficiency, electric propulsion system (ion or plasma) which docks with and attaches to the asteroid, conducts…
Numerical calculations of orbit evolutions of 1694 numbered asteroids included in the IRAS catalogue, from 13.11.1996 to 06.03.2006 were carried out. The values da - differences between the catalogue semimajor axes at 06.03.2006 and the…
Understanding the fate of planetary systems through white dwarfs which accrete debris crucially relies on tracing the orbital and physical properties of exo-asteroids during the giant branch phase of stellar evolution. Giant branch…
In addition to collisions and gravitational forces, it is now becoming widely acknowledged that photon recoil forces and torques from the asymmetric reflection and thermal re-radiation of sunlight are primary mechanisms that govern the…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
Aims. We investigate the influence of the Yarkovsky force on the long-term orbital evolution of Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Methods. Clones of the observed population with different sizes and different thermal properties were numerically…