Related papers: Measuring Regolith Strength in Reduced Gravity Env…
Small solar system bodies are becoming increasingly important as missions like NASA's OSIRIS-REx show. However, the study of the characteristics and behavior of these objects on Earth is a challenge as the simulation of their environmental…
We present an experimental investigation on the rheological behavior of model granular media made of nearly elastic spherical particles. The experiments are performed in a cylindrical Couette geometry and the experimental device is placed…
To gain a better understanding of the surfaces of planets and small bodies in the solar system, the flow behavior of granular material for various gravity levels is of utmost interest. We performed a set of reduced-gravity measurements to…
The surfaces of many planetary bodies, including asteroids and small moons, are covered with dust to pebble-sized regolith held weakly to the surface by gravity and contact forces. Understanding the reaction of regolith to an external…
Low gravity environment can have a profound impact on the behaviors of biological systems, the dynamics and heat transfer of fluids, and the growth and self-organization of materials. Systematic research on the effects of gravity is crucial…
There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions expected in the Main Belt. They are diverse in their physical properties and compositions. They are also time capsules of the early Solar System making them valuable for…
In order to improve our understanding of landing on small bodies and of asteroid evolution, we use our novel drop tower facility to perform low-velocity (2-40 cm s^-1), shallow impact experiments of a 10 cm diameter aluminum sphere into…
NASA has developed a "Figure of Merit" method to grade the fidelity of lunar simulants for scientific and engineering purposes. Here we extend the method to grade asteroid simulants, both regolith and cobble variety, and we apply the method…
Measuring the mechanical properties of cells and tissues often involves indentation with a sphere, or compression between two plates. Previously, different theoretical approaches have been developed to retrieve material parameters (e.g.…
The tensile strength of small dusty bodies in the solar system is determined by the interaction between the composing grains. In the transition regime between small and sticky dust ($\rm \mu m$) and non cohesive large grains (mm), particles…
We report the results of three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of sheared granular system in a Couette geometry.\cite{movies} The simulations use realistic boundary conditions that may be expected in physical experiments. For a…
Material deformation and failure under impact loading is a subject of active investigation in space science and often requires very specialized equipment for testing. In this work, we present the design, operational analysis and application…
Understanding dust dynamics in the vicinity of asteroids is key for future science missions and, in the long-term, for asteroid exploitation. This paper analyzes the feasibility of manipulating asteroid material by means of solar radiation…
The influence of pressure on the structural and elastic properties of ScM (M = Rh, Cu, Ag, Hg) compounds has been performed by using ab initio approach pseudopotential plane- wave method based on the density functional theory within the…
It has been conjectured by Bagnold [1] that an assembly of hard non-deformable spheres could behave as a compressible medium when slowly sheared, as the average density of such a system effectively depends on the confining pressure. Here we…
We study the counts-in-cells reduced skewness $s_3$ for dark matter, halo, and galaxy distributions in both real and redshift space, using the ELEPHANT ($\textit{Extended LEnsing PHysics with ANalytical ray Tracing}$) suite of $N$-body…
We introduce an instrument for a wide spectrum of experiments on gravities other than our planet's. It is based on a large Atwood machine where one of the loads is a bucket equipped with a single board computer and different sensors. The…
Recent studies of optimization methods and GNC of spacecraft near small bodies focusing on descent, landing, rendezvous, etc., with key safety constraints such as line-of-sight conic zones and soft landings have shown promising results;…
This study is carried out in the framework of sample-return missions to asteroids that use a low-speed projectile as the primary component of its sampling mechanism (e.g., JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions). We perform numerical…
We report on a new technique for measuring the dynamic Young's modulus, $E$, of quantum materials at low temperatures as a function of static tuning strain, $\epsilon$, in piezoactuator-driven pressure cells. In addition to a static tuning…