Related papers: Autonomous Restructuring of Asteroids into Rotatin…
The heterogeneity of the small body population complicates the prediction of small body properties before the spacecraft's arrival. In the context of autonomous small body exploration, it is crucial to develop algorithms that estimate the…
The observation of massive exoplanets at large separation from their host star, like in the HR 8799 system, challenges theories of planet formation. A possible formation mechanism involves the fragmentation of massive self-gravitating discs…
The geometric arrangement of planet and moon orbits into a regularly spaced pattern of distances is the result of a self-organizing system. The positive feedback mechanism that operates a self-organizing system is accomplished by harmonic…
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…
It is widely held that the first step in forming the gas giant planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, is to form solid `cores' of roughly 10 M$_\oplus$. Getting the cores to form before the solar nebula dissipates ($\sim\!1-10\,$Myr) has been…
We calculate numerically the collapse of slowly rotating, non-magnetic, massive molecular clumps, which conceivably could lead to the formation of massive stars. Because radiative acceleration on dust grains plays a critical role in the…
Beyond space exploration, the next critical step towards living and working in space requires developing a space economy. One important challenge with this space-economy is ensuring the low-cost transport of raw materials from one…
Deploying a humanoid robot to manipulate a new object has traditionally required one to two days of effort: data collection, manual annotation, 3D model acquisition, and model training. This paper presents an end-to-end rapid deployment…
Every robot built to date was predesigned by an external process, prior to deployment. Here we show a robot that actively participates in its own design during its lifetime. Starting from a randomly assembled body, and using only…
We develop a simple model of planetary formation, focusing our attention on those planets with masses less than 10 Earth masses and studying particularly the primordial spin parameters of planets resulting from the accretion of…
Although discs of dust and gas have been observed orbiting white dwarfs, the origin of this circumstellar matter is uncertain. We hypothesize that the in-situ breakup of small bodies such as asteroids spun to fission during the giant branch…
Asteroids are frequently colliding with small projectiles. Although each individual small collision is not very important, their cumulative effect can substantially change topography and also the overall shape of an asteroid. We run…
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…
So far, multiple stellar systems harbor more than 130 extra solar planets. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of planetary formation process can lead to various planetary architecture (i.e. location, size, mass and water content)…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
There are at least three compelling reasons for the human race to initiate a major programme to explore and better understand the 'minor planets' of the Solar System: (1) Enhancing scientific knowledge; (2) Mitigating the impact hazard; and…
Many unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance and monitoring applications require observations at precise locations over long periods of time, ideally days or weeks at a time (e.g. ecosystem monitoring), which has been impractical due to…
Stability is one of the most fundamental aspects regarding planetary systems. It plays an important role in our understanding on the formation channel of the planetary systems, as well as their habitability. Many approaches have been…
The rotation rates in the deep interior and at the surface of 22 main-sequence stars with masses between $1.0$ and $1.6\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ are constrained by combining asteroseismological analysis with spectroscopic measurements. The…
Asteroid binaries found amongst the Near-Earth objects are believed to have formed from rotational fission. In this paper, we aim to study the dynamical evolution of asteroid systems the moment after fission. The initial condition is…