Related papers: Mitigating potentially hazardous asteroid impacts …
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…
We present a model of near-Earth asteroid (NEA) rotational fission and ensuing dynamics that describes the creation of synchronous binaries and all other observed NEA systems including: doubly synchronous binaries, high- e binaries, ternary…
Context. Most small asteroids (<50 km in diameter) are the result of the breakup of a larger parent body and are often considered to be rubble-pile objects. Similar structures are expected for the secondaries of small asteroid binaries,…
We present comprehensive photometric characterisation of 2025 FA$_{22}$, a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) discovered on 29 March 2025 and observed during the seventh International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) coordinated campaign.…
Aims. Particles ejected from the lunar surface via hypervelocity impacts form a torus between the Earth and the Moon. According to our previous study (Yang et al., A\&A, 659, A120), among them about $2.3\times10^{-4}\,\mathrm{kg/s}$…
We consider the impact fragmentation of two spherical solid bodies sensitive to strain rate in a three-dimensional (3D) setting. We use both dimensional analysis and numerical simulations by smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method to…
Neglecting small fragments in space debris evolutionary models can lead to a significant underestimation of the collision risk for operational satellites. However, when scaling down to the millimeter range, the debris population grows to…
The potentially hazardous asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36 has the possibility of collision with the Earth in the latter half of the 22nd century, well beyond the traditional 100-year time horizon for routine impact monitoring. The probabilities…
It is likely that most protostellar systems undergo a brief phase where the protostellar disc is self-gravitating. If these discs are prone to fragmentation, then they are able to rapidly form objects that are initially of several Jupiter…
Space debris larger than 1 cm can damage space instruments and impact Earth. The low-Earth orbits (at heights smaller than 2000 km) and orbits near the geostationary- Earth orbit (at 35786 km height) are especially endangered, because most…
The New Horizons spacecraft's nominal trajectory crosses the planet's satellite plane at $\sim 10,000\ \rm{km}$ from the barycenter, between the orbits of Pluto and Charon. I have investigated the risk to the spacecraft based on…
Context. (3200) Phaethon is a ~5-km-diameter near-Earth asteroid with a small perihelion distance of 0.14 au and is the parent body of the Geminids. JAXA's DESTINY+ mission will fly by Phaethon in the near future. Aims. We aim to support…
In recent years, nine small near-Earth asteroids were discovered a few hours before the collision with the Earth: these are about one meter in diameter objects that have all disintegrated in the atmosphere, generating bright fireballs…
Small asteroids and large meteoroids frequently impact the Earth, though their physical and material properties remain poorly understood. When observed as fireballs in Earth's atmosphere, these properties can be inferred from their ablation…
Robotic catching of flying objects typically generates high impact forces that might lead to task failure and potential hardware damages. This is accentuated when the object mass to robot payload ratio increases, given the strong inertial…
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…
Spectral characterization of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has revealed a continuum of space-weathered states for the surfaces of S-complex NEAs, with Q-class NEAs, an S-complex subclass, most closely matching the un-weathered surfaces of…
In this fluid dynamics video, we present an experimental investigation of the shape of impact craters in granular materials. Complex crater shapes, including polygons, have been observed in many terrestrial planets as well as moons and…
The Hilda asteroids are located in the outer main belt in a stable 3:2 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter, while the quasi-Hildas (qH) have similar orbits but are not directly under the effect of the MMR. Moreover, cometary activity has…
We estimated the rate of comet and asteroid collisions with the terrestrial planets by calculating the orbits of 13000 Jupiter-crossing objects (JCOs) and 1300 resonant asteroids and computing the probabilities of collisions based on…