Related papers: Mitigating potentially hazardous asteroid impacts …
Asteroid 1934 CT;1989 AC, well known as 4179 Toutatis, is an Apollo and Mars-crosser asteroid with a chaotic orbit produced by a 3:1 resonance with Jupiter and a 1:4 resonance with the Earth, and frequent close approaches to the Earth. It…
There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions in the Main Belt. They are diverse in physical properties and composition and are time capsules of the early solar system. This makes them strategic locations for planetary…
We study orbits near collision in a non-autonomous restricted planar four-body problem. This restricted problem consists of a massless particle moving under the gravitational influence due to three bodies following the figure-eight…
As the target of the proposed Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission, the near-Earth binary asteroid 65803 Didymos represents a special class of binary asteroids, those whose primaries are at risk of rotational disruption.…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
The Hayabusa2 mission impact experiment on asteroid Ryugu created an unexpectedly large crater. The associated regime of low-gravity, low-strength cratering remained largely unexplored so far, because these impact conditions cannot be…
We study the time evolution of the impact probability for synthetic but realistic impacting and close approaching asteroids detected in a simulated all-sky survey. We use the impact probability to calculate the impact warning time as the…
Asteroids can be eclipsed by other bodies in the Solar System, but no direct observation of an asteroid eclipse has been reported to date. We describe a statistical method to predict an eclipse for an asteroid based on the analysis of the…
The number of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) has continued to grow in the last decade. Follow-up and recovery of newly discovered objects, as well as new astrometry at second or third…
We assess the ability of a solid ring to model a global perturbation induced by several thousands of main-belt asteroids. The ring is first studied in an analytical framework that provides an estimate of all the ring's parameters excepting…
The coagulation of microscopic dust into planetesimals is the first step towards planet formation. The size and shape of the growing aggregates determine the efficiency of this early growth. It has been proposed that fluffy ice aggregates…
Recently the first Earth Trojan has been observed (Mainzer et al., ApJ 731) and found to be on an interesting orbit close to the Lagrange point L4 (Connors et al., Nature 475). In the present study we therefore perform a detailed…
Fireball networks establish the trajectories of meteoritic material passing through Earth's atmosphere, from which they can derive pre-entry orbits. Triangulated atmospheric trajectory data requires different orbit determination methods to…
Orbits in a three-dimensional potential subjected to periodic driving, V(x^i,t)=[1+m_0 sin(omega t) V_0(x^i), divide naturally into two types, regular and chaotic, between which transitions are seemingly impossible. The chaotic orbits…
Impact fragmentation is the underlying principle of comminution milling of dry, bulk solids. Unfortunately the outcome of the fragmentation process is more or less determined by the dimensionality of the impactor and its impact velocity.…
The focus of this work is the current distribution of asteroids in co-orbital motion with Venus, Earth and Jupiter, under a quasi-coplanar configuration and for a medium-term timescale of the order of 900 years. A co-orbital trajectory is a…
We present a general analytic framework to assess whether impact ejecta launched from the surface of a satellite can escape the gravitational influence of the planet--satellite system and enter heliocentric orbit. Using a patched-conic…
Deflecting an asteroid from an Earth impact trajectory requires only small velocity changes, typically of the order of microns per second, if done many years ahead of time. For this, a highly precise method of determining the need,…
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…
The zodiacal cloud is one of the largest structures in the solar system and strongly governed by meteoroid collisions near the Sun. Collisional erosion occurs throughout the zodiacal cloud, yet it is historically difficult to directly…