Related papers: Target selection for Near-Earth Asteroids in-orbit…
This work analyzes the energetics of asteroid rubble piles in order to understand what asteroid morphologies should naturally arise from their formation and evolution process. In doing this, a phase diagram is developed that maps out the…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the first full-scale test of the kinetic impactor method for asteroid deflection, in which a spacecraft intentionally impacts an asteroid to change its trajectory. DART represents an…
Context. Earlier work suggests that slowly rotating asteroids should have higher thermal inertias than faster rotators because the heat wave penetrates deeper into the sub-surface. However, thermal inertias have been determined mainly for…
We propose a direct imaging method for the detection of exoplanets based on a combined low-rank plus structured sparse model. For this task, we develop a dictionary of possible effective circular trajectories a planet can take during the…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
We have made an extensive search for grouping amongst the near Earth asteroids (NEAs). We used two D- functions and rigorous cluster analysis approach. We have found sev- eral new groups (associations) among the NEAs: the objects moving on…
All known Small Solar System Bodies have diameters between a few meters and a few thousands of kilometers. Based on the collisional evolution of Solar System Bodies, a larger number of asteroids with diameters down to $\sim 2$ m is thought…
Asteroid shapes and satellites: role of gravitational reaccumulation. Following current evidences, it is widely accepted that many asteroids would be "gravitational aggregates", i.e. bodies lacking internal cohesion. They could mainly be…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
The terrestrial planets formed by accretion of asteroid-like objects within the inner solar system's protoplanetary disk. Previous works have found that forming a small-mass Mars requires the disk to contain little mass beyond ~1.5 au…
We investigated the reliability of the genetic algorithm which will be used to invert the photometric measurements of asteroids collected by the European Space Agency Gaia mission. To do that, we performed several sets of simulations for 10…
Through multiple, small unmanned probes we can more efficiently capture an asteroid and return it to lunar orbit. The Asteroid Return and Exploration System (ARES) aims to make use of previously tested technology with the application of a…
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 population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
Direct detection of dark matter continues to elude scientists' many attempts to see it interact, and still to this day the only way we know it is there is through observed gravitational effects. The many search experiments are at the point…
It is well known that asteroids and comets fall into the Sun. Metal pollution of white dwarfs and transient spectroscopic signatures of young stars like $\beta$-Pic provide growing evidence that extra solar planetesimals can attain extreme…
Asteroid modeling efforts in the last decade resulted in a comprehensive dataset of almost 400 convex shape models and their rotation states. This amount already provided a deep insight into physical properties of main-belt asteroids or…
The rotational distribution of asteroids as a function of their size is used {as a diagnostic of} their physical properties and evolution. Recent photometric surveys from the Gaia mission, allowing observation of asteroids with long spin…
Asteroid mining can become an enabling technology to establish a sustainable manned colony on Mars, which requires metallic materials more often than they are readily available in shipments from Earth. This paper describes a feasibility…