Related papers: Long-term orbital evolution of Dimorphos boulders …
The paper discusses a model of the bombardment of the Earth and the Moon by small bodies when these planets were formed. It is shown that the total ice mass delivered with the bodies to the Earth from the feeding zone of the giant planets…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
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…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…
We investigated 634 crater clusters on Mars detected between 2007 and 2021, which represent more than half of all impacts discovered in this period. Crater clusters form when meteoroids in the 10 kg to 10 ton mass range break-up in Mars'…
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…
While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. Several approaches have been proposed to…
The orbital evolution of more than 22000 Jupiter-crossing objects under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. We found that the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects (from initial orbits close to the…
The DART spacecraft will impact Didymos's secondary, Dimorphos, at the end of 2022 and cause a change in the orbital period of the secondary. For simplicity, most previous numerical simulations of the impact used a spherical projectile…
We report observations of the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) in support of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Our…
This work examines the plausibility of a lunar origin of natural objects that have a negative total energy (ET) with respect to the geocenter while within 3 Earth Hill radii (RH), a population that we will refer to as 'bound'. They are a…
Dimorphos' oblate shape challenges formation models. Landslides on Didymos, induced by YORP effect, probably created a debris ring from which Dimorphos would have formed. Nonetheless, ring-derived satellites typically form with a prolate…
To date, rings are found around a Centaur (10199) Chariklo, trans-neptunian objects (TNOs) (136108) Haumea, and (50000) Quaoar. These discoveries suggest that asteroidal ring systems may be common, particularly in the outer solar system.…
We have developed a statistical framework that uses collisional evolution models, shock physics modeling and scaling laws to determine the range of plausible collisional histories for individual meteorite parent bodies. It is likely that…
We compare the number of lunar craters larger than 15 km across and younger than 1.1 Ga to the estimates of the number of craters that could have been formed for 1.1 Ga if the number of near-Earth objects and their orbital elements during…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
Didymos and Dimorphos are primary and secondary, respectively, asteroids who compose a binary system that make up the set of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). They are targets of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the first test…
The computation of the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID) is an old, but increasingly relevant problem. Fast and precise methods for MOID computation are needed to select potentially hazardous asteroids from a large catalogue. The…
Binary asteroid formation is a highly complex process, which has been highlighted with recent observations of satellites with unexpected shapes, such as the oblate Dimorphos by the NASA DART mission and the contact binary Selam by NASA's…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…