Related papers: Painting Asteroids for Planetary Defense
The distribution of heavy elements is anomalously low in the asteroid main belt region compared with elsewhere in the solar system. Observational surveys also indicate a deficit in the number of small ($ \le 50$~km size) asteroids that is…
Based on a linearized model of the Yarkovsky effect, we investigate in this paper the dependence of the semimajor axis drift $\Delta a$ of a celestial body on its size, spinning obliquity, initial orbit and thermal parameters on its…
Asteroid impacts pose a major threat to all life on Earth. The age of the dinosaurs was abruptly ended by a 10-km-diameter asteroid. Currently, a nuclear device is the only means of deflecting large Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)…
A trending astronomical phenomenon to study is the variation in brightness of asteroids, caused by its rotation on its own axis, non-spherical shapes, changes of albedo along its surface and its position relative to the sun. The latter…
Photometric observations of asteroids show that some of them are in non-principal axis rotation state (free precession), called tumbling. Collisions between asteroids have been proposed as a possible asteroid rotation excitation mechanism.…
The moniker rubble pile is typically applied to all solar system bodies with Diameter between 200m and 10km - where in this size range there is an abundance of evidence that nearly every object is bound primarily by self-gravity with…
With N-body simulations of a planetary system with an asteroid belt we investigate how the asteroid impact rate on the Earth is affected by the architecture of the planetary system. We find that the $\nu_6$ secular resonance plays an…
We present an adaptation of the ATPM to simultaneously predict the Yarkovsky and YORP effects in the presence of global self-heating that occurs within the large concavities of irregularly shaped asteroids, which has been neglected or…
Any population of asteroids, like asteroid families, will disperse in semi-major axis due to the Yarkovsky effect. The amount of drift is modulated by the asteroid spin state evolution which determines the balance between the diurnal and…
Between 2010 and 2017 we have collected new optical and radar observations of the potentially hazardous asteroid (2102)~Tantalus from the ESO NTT and Danish telescopes at the La Silla Observatory and from the Arecibo planetary radar. The…
Space debris larger than 1 cm can damage space instruments and impact Earth. The low-Earth orbits (at heights smaller than 2000 km) and orbits near the geostationary- Earth orbit (at 35786 km height) are especially endangered, because most…
Context: Asteroids with a diameter of up to a few dozen meters may spin very fast and complete an entire rotation within a few minutes. These small and fast-rotating bodies are thought to be monolithic objects because the gravitational…
Space weathering is the generic term used for processes that modify the optical properties of surfaces of atmosphereless rocky bodies under exposure to the space environment. The general agreement about the relevance of the effects of space…
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,…
Results from the TESS mission showed that previous studies strngly underestimated the number of slow rotators, revealing the importance of studying those asteroids. For most slowly rotating asteroids (P > 12), no spin and shape model is…
Most asteroids with a diameter larger than $\sim 300 \ {\rm m}$ are rubble piles i.e. consisting of more than one solid object. All asteroids are rotating but almost all asteroids larger than $\sim 300 \ {\rm m}$ rotate with a period longer…
Boulders, rocks and regolith on fast rotating asteroids (<2.5 hours) are modeled to slide towards the equator due to a strong centrifugal force and a low cohesion force. As a result, regions of fresh subsurface material can be exposed.…
We have investigated the effect of rotation on the polarization of scattered light for the near-Earth asteroid (1943) Anteros using the Dual Beam Imaging Polarimeter on the University of Hawaii's 2.2 m telescope. Anteros is an L-type…
The boundaries of the Uranian epsilon, alpha, and beta rings can be fitted by Keplerian ellipses. The pair of ellipses that outline a given ring share a common line of apsides. Apse alignment is surprising because the quadrupole moment of…
We have computed the deflection angles caused by 195 objects in the solar system, including 177 satellites and eight asteroids. Twenty-one satellites and six asteroids can bend light from distant compact extragalactic sources by more than…