Related papers: Ab initio strewn field for small asteroids impacts
Granvik et al. (2016) report an absence of asteroids on orbits with perihelia near the Sun that they attribute to the 'supercatastrophic disruption' of these bodies. Here we investigate whether there is evidence for this process among other…
Exploration of asteroids and comets can give insight into the origins of the solar system and can be instrumental in planetary defence and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Asteroids, due to their low gravity are a challenging target for…
Knowledge of the interior density distribution of an asteroid can reveal its composition and constrain its evolutionary history. However, most asteroid observational techniques are not sensitive to interior properties. We investigate the…
On June 30, 1908, at about 0h 14.5m UTC, the Tunguska Event (TE) occurred, most likely caused by the fall of a small stony asteroid of about 50-80 meters in diameter over the basin of the Tunguska River (Central Siberia). This paper will…
Dynamical models of the asteroid delivery from the main belt suggest that the current impact flux of diameter D>10 km asteroids on the Earth is 0.5-1 per Gyr. Studies of the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) population find a much higher flux, with…
We report new observations of the active asteroid P/2010 A2 taken when it made its closest approach to the Earth (1.06 au in 2017 January) after its first discovery in 2010. Despite a crucial role of the rotational period in clarifying its…
A class of asteroids, called large super-fast rotators (large SFRs), have rotation periods shorter than 2 hours and diameters larger than ~ 0.3 km. They pose challenges to the usual interior rubble-pile structure unless a relatively high…
The rapid accumulation of thermal infrared observations and shape models of asteroids has led to increased interest in thermophysical modeling. Most of these infrared observations are unresolved. We consider what fraction of an asteroid's…
We present a dynamical analysis of the fragmented active asteroid 331P/Gibbs. Using archival images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope from 2015 to 2018, we measured the astrometry of the primary and the three brightest (presumably the…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
Some asteroids eject dust, unexpectedly producing transient, comet-like comae and tails. First ascribed to the sublimation of near-surface water ice, mass losing asteroids (also called "main-belt comets") can in fact be driven by a…
The Gaia second data release contains high-accuracy astrometric measurements of thousands of solar system bodies. These measurements raise the possibility of determining asteroid masses by modeling scattering events between massive objects…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
There is an unceasing incoming flux of extraterrestrial materials reaching the Earth's atmosphere. Some of these objects produce luminous columns when they ablate during the hypersonic encounter with air molecules. A few fireballs occur…
Meteor clusters are typically defined as groups of meteors that appear close together in both space and time. To date, only a handful of such events have been recorded instrumentally and analysed in detail. In many documented cases, thermal…
Many asteroids that make close encounters with terrestrial planets are in a binary configuration. Here we calculate the relevant encounter timescales and investigate the effects of encounters on a binary's mutual orbit. We use a combination…
Solar system object P/2010 A2 is the first-noticed example of the aftermath of a recently disrupted asteroid, probably resulting from a collision. Nearly a year elapsed between its inferred initiation in early 2009 and its eventual…
We report the direct detection of radiation pressure on the asteroid 2009 BD, one of the smallest multi-opposition near-Earth objects currently known, with H ~ 28.4. Under the purely gravitational model of NEODyS the object is currently…
This paper presents an analysis of optimal impact strategies to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. To compute the increase in the minimum orbit intersection distance of the asteroid due to an impact with a spacecraft, simple…
We consider 9 fields of low ecliptic latitude observed at 12 microns centered on QSOs. In these fields we detect 7 additional background sources at the level of 0.4-4mJy in 70 square arcminutes. 4 of these sources correspond to galaxies…