Related papers: Shallow Encounters' Impact on Asteroid Deflection …
Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…
When an asteroid has a few observations over a short time span the information contained in the observational arc could be so little that a full orbit determination may be not possible. One of the methods developed in recent years to…
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…
The dynamical interaction of minor bodies (such as comets or asteroids) with planets plays an essential role in the planetary system's architecture and evolution. As a result of these interactions, structures like the Kuiper belt and the…
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…
Everyday thousands of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere. The vast majority burn up harmlessly during the descent, but the larger objects survive, occasionally experiencing intense fragmentation events, and reach the ground. These…
The question of whether to attempt deflections during planetary defence emergencies has been subject to considerable decision-making analysis (Schmidt 2018; SMPAG Ad-Hoc Working Group on Legal Issues 2020). Hypothetical situations usually…
Accurate modeling of gravitational interactions is fundamental to the analysis, prediction, and control of space systems. While the Newtonian point-mass approximation suffices for many preliminary studies, real celestial bodies exhibit…
During the last decade, the precision in the tracking of spacecraft has constantly improved. The discovery of few astrometric anomalies, such as the Pioneer and Earth flyby anomalies, stimulated further analysis of the operative modeling…
Conjunction assessment requires knowledge of the uncertainty in the predicted orbit. Errors in the atmospheric density are a major source of error in the prediction of low Earth orbits. Therefore, accurate estimation of the density and…
Trajectory Prediction of dynamic objects is a widely studied topic in the field of artificial intelligence. Thanks to a large number of applications like predicting abnormal events, navigation system for the blind, etc. there have been many…
There are several differences between the planetary entry of space vehicles and that of asteroids. In this work we do investigate the applicability of classical methods and approaches developed for debris analysis to asteroid entry. In…
Conjunction analysis and maneuver planning for spacecraft collision avoidance remains a manual and time-consuming process, typically involving repeated forward simulations of hand-designed maneuvers. With the growing density of satellites…
Pairwise collisions between terrestrial embryos are the dominant means of accretion during the last stage of planet formation. Hence, their realistic treatment in N-body studies is critical to accurately model the formation of terrestrial…
Satellite tracking involves sending electromagnetic signals to Earth. Both the orbit of the spacecraft and the electromagnetic signals themselves are affected by the curvature of spacetime. The arrival time of the pulses is compared to the…
This paper discusses the design and the performance achievable with active aerodynamic attitude control in very low Earth orbit, i.e. below 450 km in altitude. A novel real-time algorithm is proposed for selecting the angles of deflection…
Context: Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA) in Earth-crossing orbits pose a constant threat to life on Earth. Several mitigation methods have been proposed, and the most feasible technique appears to be the disintegration of the impactor…
Stellar flybys in star clusters are suspected to affect the orbital architecture of planetary systems causing eccentricity excitation and orbital misalignment between the planet orbit and the equatorial plane of the star. We explore whether…
We analyze situations where a saddle-node bifurcation occurs on a fractal basin boundary. Specifically, we are interested in what happens when a system parameter is slowly swept in time through the bifurcation. Such situations are known to…
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the first full-scale test of an asteroid deflection technology. Results from the hypervelocity kinetic impact and Earth-based observations, coupled with LICIACube and the later Hera mission,…