Related papers: Predicting asteroid material properties from a DAR…

Ejecta from Dimorphos following the DART mission impact, significantly increased the brightness of the Didymos-Dimorphos system, allowing us to examine sub-surface material. We report daily near-IR spectroscopic observations of the Didymos…

Target of NASA's DART mission, the system of Didymos and Dimorphos will once again be visited by a space mission -- ESA's Hera mission, scheduled to be launch in 2024. Hera will arrive in the system approximately 4 years after the DART…

We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is applied to four different problems, namely…

Surface charging phenomenon of asteroids, mainly resulting from solar wind plasma and solar radiation, has been studied extensively. However, the influence of asteroid's rotation on surface charging has yet to be fully understood. Here…

Didymos is a binary near-Earth asteroid. It is the target of the DART and HERA space missions. The primary body, Didymos, rotates close to the spin at which it is expected to shed mass. The secondary body, Dimorphos, is a 140 meters moon…

We present a method for calculating precise distances to asteroids using only two nights of data from a single location --- far too little for an orbit --- by exploiting the angular reflex motion of the asteroids due to Earth's axial…

This paper presents the development of an in situ measurement system known as the Debris Resistive Acoustic Grid Orbital Navy/NASA Sensor (DRAGONS). The DRAGONS system is designed to detect impacts caused by particles ranging from 50…

The DART spacecraft impacted Dimorphos, the satellite of (65803) Didymos, in September 2022. Evidence of crater formation and possible global reshaping has been obtained indirectly from spacecraft and ground-based data. Since the impact,…

The HyperScout-H (HS-H) instrument is one of the payloads aboard ESA's Hera spacecraft. Hera is a planetary defence mission that aims to provide a detailed characterization of the near-Earth binary asteroid (65803) Didymos-Dimorphos after…

A method for asteroid deflection that makes use of a spacecraft moving back and forth on a segment of an appropriate Keplerian orbit about the asteroid is described and evaluated. It is shown that, on average, the spacecraft describing such…

Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…

Collision-resilient quadrotors have gained significant attention given their potential for operating in cluttered environments and leveraging impacts to perform agile maneuvers. However, existing designs are typically single-mode: either…

Current practice for asteroid close proximity maneuvers requires extremely accurate characterization of the environmental dynamics and precise spacecraft positioning prior to the maneuver. This creates a delay of several months between the…

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,…

An asteroid impact is a low probability event with potentially devastating consequences. The Asteroid Risk Mitigation Optimization and Research (ARMOR) software tool calculates whether a colliding asteroid experiences an airburst or surface…

Metallic bodies that were the cores of differentiated bodies are sources of iron meteorites and are considered to have formed early in the terrestrial planet region before migrating to the main asteroid belt. Surface temperatures and mutual…

The thermal inertia of an asteroid's surface can provide insight into regolith properties, such as the presence of a layer of fine dust, the density and thermal conductivity of a rocky surface, and, together with other observational data,…

We present deep Hubble Space Telescope images taken to examine the ejecta from the DART spacecraft impact into asteroid Dimorphos. The images reveal an extensive population of co-moving boulders, the largest of which is about 7 m in…

Here we explore a technique for constraining physical properties of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) based on variability in thermal emission as a function of viewing aspect. We present case studies of the low albedo, near-Earth asteroids…

Granular material that is bound by the low gravity of a small asteroid is mobilized by slow velocity impacts. These splashes generated by impacts might play an important role in sculpting the asteroid's surface. In laboratory experiments we…