Related papers: Resurfacing processes constrained by crater distri…
Spin off events and impacts can eject boulders from an asteroid surface and rubble pile asteroids can accumulate from debris following a collision between large asteroids. These processes produce a population of gravitational bound objects…
The current properties of small bodies provide important clues to their origin and history. However, how much small bodies were processed by past collisions and to what extent they retain a record of processes that took place during the…
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…
Icy planetesimals are likely to supply volatiles to terrestrial planets and serve as building blocks of icy bodies in the outer Solar System. Samples from the C-type asteroid Ryugu, collected by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, indicate a…
Recent analyses of samples from asteroid (162173) Ryugu returned by JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission suggest that Ryugu and CI chondrites formed in the same region of the protoplanetary disk, in a reservoir that was isolated from the source regions…
It is known, from observational data recorded from airbursts, that small asteroids breakup at dynamical pressures lower than their mechanical strength. This means that actual theoretical models are inconsistent with observations. In this…
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$~km size) asteroids that is…
Young asteroid families are unique sources of information about fragmentation physics and the structure of their parent bodies, since their physical properties have not changed much since their birth. Families have different properties such…
We infer the crater chronologies of Ceres and Vesta from a self-consistent dynamical model of asteroid impactors. The model accounts for planetary migration/instability early in the solar system history and tracks asteroid orbits over 4.56…
We consider an impact on an asteroid that is energetic enough to cause resurfacing by seismic reverberation and just below the catastrophic disruption threshold, assuming that seismic waves are not rapidly attenuated. In asteroids with…
Asteroid Ryugu and asteroid Bennu, which were recently visited by spacecraft Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, respectively, are spinning top-shaped rubble piles. Other axisymmetric top-shaped near-Earth asteroids have been observed with…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
Context. Upcoming space missions will provide us with surface-resolved NEA reflectance spectra. Neural networks are useful tools for analysing reflectance spectra and determining material composition with high precision and low processing…
A framework for the theoretical and analytical understanding of the impact crater-size frequency distribution is developed and applied to observed data from Mars and Earth. The analitical model derived gives the crater population,N, as a…
Evidence is seen for young, fresh surfaces among Near-Earth and Main-Belt asteroids even though space-weathering timescales are shorter than the age of the surfaces. A number of mechanisms have been proposed to refresh asteroid surfaces on…
The small ($\le$ 135 km mean radius) saturnian satellites are closely related to the rings and together they constitute a complex dynamical system where formation and destruction mechanisms compete against each other. We model the cratering…
Impact-cratering processes on small bodies are thought to be mainly controlled by the local material strength because of their low surface gravity, and craters that are as large as the parent bodies should be affected by the target…
It is now becoming widely accepted that photon recoil forces from the asymmetric reflection and thermal re-radiation of absorbed sunlight are, together with collisions and gravitational forces, primary mechanisms governing the dynamical and…
Near-Earth small-body mission targets 162173 Ryugu, 101955 Bennu, and 25143 Itokawa produce gravity fields around 4 orders of magnitude below that of Earth and their irregular shapes, combined with rotational effects produce varying surface…
Giant impacts by comets and asteroids have probably had an important influence on terrestrial biological evolution. We know of around 180 high velocity impact craters on the Earth with ages up to 2400Myr and diameters up to 300km. Some…