Related papers: The science from asteroid sample return missions

Recent discoveries imply that Early Mars was habitable for life-as-we-know-it; that Enceladus might be habitable; and that many stars have Earth-sized exoplanets whose insolation favors surface liquid water. These exciting discoveries make…

Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…

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 study of asteroids, its composition and trajectories, has been a persistent interest in the space exploration community. In addition, they are also perceived as a great threat to life on Earth, considering the possibility of an impact…

Carbonaceous asteroids, including Ryugu and Bennu, which have been explored by the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx missions, were probably important carriers of volatiles to the inner Solar System. However, Ryugu has experienced significant…

Early detection and tracking of ejecta in the vicinity of small solar system bodies is crucial to guarantee spacecraft safety and support scientific observation. During the visit of active asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft relied on…

We determine the possible detection rate of asteroids with the Bering mission. In particular we examine the outcome of the Bering mission in relation to the populations of Near-Earth Asteroids and main belt asteroids. This is done by…

The reentry of the OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Capsule (SRC) on September 24, 2023, presented a rare opportunity to study atmospheric entry dynamics through a dense network of ground-based infrasound sensors. As the first interplanetary…

JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission successfully returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in December 2020. It executed two touchdowns to collect the surface and subsurface materials, one close to the crater created by an artificial impactor. The…

The Origins Space Telescope (Origins) traces our cosmic history, from the formation of the first galaxies and the rise of metals to the development of habitable worlds and present-day life. Origins does this through exquisite sensitivity to…

NASA's OSIRIS-REx and JAXA's Hayabusa2 sample-return missions are currently on their way to encounter primitive near-Earth asteroids (101955) Bennu and (162173) Ryugu, respectively. Spectral and dynamical evidence indicates that these…

Some asteroids eject dust, producing transient, comet-like comae and tails; these are the active asteroids. The causes of activity in this newly-identified population are many and varied. They include impact ejection and disruption,…

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…

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is the third NASA New Frontiers Program mission and arrived at the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu in December 2018.…

Fifteen orbital clusters (associations) were identified among ~20000 near Earth asteroids (NEAs). All associations were found with a high statistical reliability using a single linkage cluster analysis algorithm and three orbital similarity…

Comets likely formed in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula where they incorporated and preserved primitive presolar materials, volatiles resident in the outer disk, and more refractory materials from throughout the disk. The return…

We review the state of knowledge on the origin of Earth's water. Empirical constraints come from chemical and isotopic measurements of solar system bodies and of Earth itself. Dynamical models have revealed pathways for water delivery to…

Hazardous asteroid has been one of the concerns for humankind as fallen asteroid on earth could cost a huge impact on the society.Monitoring these objects could help predict future impact events, but such efforts are hindered by the large…

The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…

The Earth contains between one and ten oceans of water, including water within the mantle, where one ocean is the mass of water on the Earth's surface today. With $n$-body simulations we consider how much water could have been delivered…