Related papers: Asteroid collisions: expected visibility and rate
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…
We carried out low-resolution optical spectroscopy of 51 main-belt asteroids, most of which have highly-inclined orbits. They are selected from D-type candidates in the SDSS-MOC 4 catalog. Using the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope and…
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments,…
While the number of asteroids with known shapes has drastically increased over the past few years, little is known on the the time-evolution of shapes and the underlying physical processes. Here we propose an averaged abrasion model based…
We have developed a model to predict the post-collision brightness increase of sub-catastrophic collisions between asteroids and to evaluate the likelihood of a survey detecting these events. It is based on the cratering scaling laws of…
Recent dynamical studies have identified pairs of asteroids that reside in nearly identical heliocentric orbits. Possible formation scenarios for these systems include dissociation of binary asteroids, collisional disruption of a single…
The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…
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,…
Close to the Roche radius of a white dwarf (WD), an asteroid on a circular orbit sheds material that then adopts a very similar orbit. Observations of the resulting debris show a periodic behavior and changes in flux on short timescales,…
We have monitored the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid in spectropolarimetric mode in the optical range before and after the DART impact. The ultimate goal was to obtain constraints on the characteristics of the ejected dust for modelling…
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…
Most asteroids are somewhat elongated and have non-zero lightcurve amplitudes. Such asteroids can be detected in large-scale sky surveys even if their mean magnitudes are fainter than the stated sensitivity limits. We explore the detection…
We consider collisions occurring between stars moving near the speed of light around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with mass $M_{\bullet}\gtrsim10^8\,M_\odot$, without being tidally disrupted. In this SMBH range, for sun-like stars, the…
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 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will be the first test of a kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. In late 2022, DART will collide with Dimorphos, the secondary in the Didymos binary asteroid system. The…
Target of NASA's DART mission, the system of Didymos and Dimorphos will once again be visited by a space mission -- ESA's Hera mission, scheduled to be launch in 2024. Hera will arrive in the system approximately 4 years after the DART…
Previous efforts have modeled the Didymos system as two irregularly shaped rigid bodies, although it is likely that one or both components are in fact rubble piles. Here, we relax the rigid-body assumption to quantify how this affects the…
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…
We present a method for calculating precise distances to asteroids using only two nights of data from a single location --- far too little for an orbit --- by exploiting the angular reflex motion of the asteroids due to Earth's axial…
We have performed detailed dynamical modeling of the structure of a faint dust band observed in coadded IRAS data at an ecliptic latitude of 17$^{\circ}$ that convincingly demonstrates that it is the result of a relatively recent…