Related papers: Painting Asteroids for Planetary Defense

The rubble pile spin barrier is an upper limit on the rotation rate of asteroids larger than ~200-300 m. Among thousands of asteroids with diameters larger than ~300 m, only a handful of asteroids are known to rotate faster than 2.0 h, all…

The discovery of over 50 planets around evolved stars and more than 35 debris discs orbiting white dwarfs highlight the increasing need to understand small body evolution around both early and asymptotic giant branch (GB) stars. Pebbles and…

While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…

The timescales over which the YORP effect alters the rotation period and the obliquity of a small asteroid can be very different, because the corresponding torques couple to different aspects of the object's shape. For nearly axisymmetric,…

This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. To compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple…

We present an analysis of the albedo properties of main belt asteroids detected by the All-Sky Survey of the infrared satellite AKARI. The characteristics of 5120 asteroids detected by the survey, including their sizes and albedos, were…

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 inner asteroid belt between 2.1 and 2.5 au is of particular dynamical significance because it is the dominant source of both chondritic meteorites and near-Earth asteroids. This inner belt is bounded by an eccentricity-type secular…

Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…

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 potentially hazardous asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36 has the possibility of collision with the Earth in the latter half of the 22nd century, well beyond the traditional 100-year time horizon for routine impact monitoring. The probabilities…

The rotation state of small asteroids is affected by the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect, which is a net torque caused by solar radiation directly reflected and thermally reemitted from the surface. Due to this effect,…

Shock-induced changes in ordinary chondrite meteorites related to impacts or planetary collisions are known to be capable of altering their optical properties. Thus, one can hypothesize that a significant portion of the ordinary chondrite…

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…

The recent discovery of a planetary transit in the star HD 209458, and the subsequent highly precise observation of the transit lightcurve with Hubble Space Telescope, is encouraging to search for any phenomena that might induce small…

We present an analysis of the accuracy of geometric albedos determined for asteroids through the modeling of observed thermal infrared radiation. We show that albedo uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty on the measured $H_V$ absolute…

Atira-class asteroids have aphelia greater than 0.718 au and smaller than 0.983 au. It has been found that the orbits of many of them remain relatively stable for at least 1 Myr, but it is unclear what can make them so stable when they…

We describe systematic ranging, an orbit determination technique especially suitable to assess the near-term Earth impact hazard posed by newly discovered asteroids. For these late warning cases, the time interval covered by the…

The general relativistic Lense-Thirring precessions of the perihelia of the inner planets of the Solar System are about 10^-3 arcseconds per century. Recent improvements in planetary orbit determination may yield the first observational…

We present thermal properties and an improved shape model for potentially hazardous asteroid (162421) 2000 ET70. In addition to the radar data from 2000 ET70's apparition in 2012, our model incorporates optical lightcurves and infrared…