Related papers: Don't Forget To Look Up
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
Cometary impacts pose a long-term hazard to life on Earth. Impact mitigation techniques have been studied extensively, but they tend to focus on asteroid diversion. Typical asteroid interdiction schemes involve spacecraft physically…
We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS 1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated towards small…
Asteroid collisions are one of the main processes responsible for the evolution of bodies in the main belt. Using observations of the Dimorphos impact by the DART spacecraft, we estimate how asteroid collisions in the main belt may look in…
Centaurs are solar system objects with orbits situated among the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Centaurs represent one of the sources of Near-Earth Objects. Thus, it is crucial to understand their orbital evolution which in some cases might…
Noble metals and gases are very sensitive to the late accretion to the Earth of asteroids and comets. We present mass balance arguments based on these elements that indicate that 0.7E22-2.7E22 kg of extraterrestrial bodies struck the Earth…
In 1980, Alvarez and colleagues proposed that, in the transition from the Cretaceous to Paleogene, a large impactor collided with Earth being the cause of the mass extinction occurred at the limit K / Pg. In 1980 there was no known impact…
In the last decades Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have become very important targets to study, since they can give us clues to the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. In addition, they may represent either a threat to…
Currently, 20 co-orbital asteroids of Venus are known, with only one with an eccentricity below 0.38. This is most likely caused by observational biases since asteroids with larger eccentricities may approach the Earth and are easier to…
The extraordinary weather conditions available between February and March 2022 over Spain have allowed us to analyze the brightest fireballs recorded by the monitoring stations of the Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN). We study the atmospheric…
Everyday thousands of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere. The vast majority burn up harmlessly during the descent, but the larger objects survive, occasionally experiencing intense fragmentation events, and reach the ground. These…
The goal of this work is to determine if the dynamics of individual Taurid Complex (TC) objects are consistent with the formation of the complex via fragmentation of a larger body, or if the current orbital affinities between the TC members…
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids, comets and meteoroids in heliocentric orbits with perihelion below 1.3 au. Similarly to the population of the Main Asteroid Belt, NEOs are primordial bodies and their study can improve our…
Comet disintegration proceeds both through sublimation and discrete splitting events. The cross-sectional area of material ejected by a comet may, within days, become many times greater than that of the Earth, making encounters with such…
On June 2, 2016 at 10h56m UTC, a $-20.4 \pm 0.2$ magnitude superbolide was observed over Arizona. Fragments were located a few days later and the meteorites were given the name Dishchii'bikoh. We present analysis of this event based on 3…
Asteroid impactors larger than ~10 m, from Chelyabinsk-scale airburst and Tunguska-scale events to >300 m continental threats, remain the dominant planetary-defense risk. While the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time…
By using recent observations of the Dydimos-Dimorphos system from the Hubble Space Telescope, 37 boulders with a size of 4 to 7 meters ejected from the system during the impact with the DART spacecraft were identified. In this work, we…
We have carried out simulations to predict the performance of a new space-based telescopic survey operating at thermal infrared wavelengths that seeks to discover and characterize a large fraction of the potentially hazardous near-Earth…
The orbital evolution of Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), resonant asteroids, and asteroidal, trans-Neptunian, and cometary dust particles under the gravitational influence of planets was integrated. For dust particles we also considered…
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,…