Related papers: The science from asteroid sample return missions
Asteroids are remnants of the material from which the Solar System formed. Fragments of asteroids, in the form of meteorites, include samples of the first solid matter to form in our Solar System 4.5 mia years ago. Spectroscopic studies of…
In the near-Earth asteroid population, binary and triple systems have been discovered with mutual orbits that have significant eccentricities as well as large semi-major axes. All known systems with eccentric orbits and all widely-separated…
The water content and habitability of terrestrial planets are determined during their final assembly, from perhaps a hundred 1000-km "planetary embryos" and a swarm of billions of 1-10 km "planetesimals." During this process, we assume that…
Automated asteroid detection routines set requirements on the number of detections, signal-to-noise ratio, and the linearity of the expected motion in order to balance completeness, reliability, and time delay after data acquisition when…
There are more than 750,000 asteroids identified in the main belt. These asteroids are diverse in composition and size. Some of these asteroids can be traced back to the early solar system and can provide insight into the origins of the…
In this paper we put forward a proposal to use Near Earth Objects as radiation shield for deep space exploration. In principle these objects can provide also a spacious habitat for the astronauts and their supplies on their journeys. We…
Cosmic rays originating from extraterrestrial sources are permanently arriving at Earth atmosphere, where they produce up to billions of secondary particles. The analysis of the secondary particles reaching to the surface of the Earth may…
Understanding the geological modification processes on asteroids can provide information concerning their surface history. Images of small asteroids from spacecraft show a depletion in terms of smaller craters. Seismic shaking was…
Among the currently known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), roughly 1400 are classified as being potentially hazardous asteroids. The recent Chelyabinsk event has shown that these objects can pose a real threat to mankind. We illustrate that high…
It is widely accepted that a quasi-steady-state flux of minor bodies moving in and out of the co-orbital state with the Earth may exist. Some of these objects are very good candidates for future in situ study due to their favourable…
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…
When the first CubeSats were launched nearly two decades ago, few people believed that the miniature satellites would likely prove to be a useful scientific tool. Skeptics abounded. However, the last decade has seen the highly successful…
The OSIRIS-REx Mission was selected under the NASA New Frontiers program and is scheduled for launch in September of 2016 for a rendezvous with, and collection of a sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu in 2019. 101955 Bennu (previously…
Asteroids can be considered as sources of contamination of point sources and also sources of confusion noise, depending whether their presence is detected in the image or their flux is under the detection limit. We estimate that at low…
X-ray observations of star-planet systems are important to grow our understanding of exoplanets; these observation allow for studies of photoevaporation of the exoplanetary atmosphere, and in some cases even estimations of the size of the…
This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…
The Art, Astronomy, Technology and Society (AATS) project is an artscience collaboration which dwells in the inbetweenness layer of scientific understanding of the origins of planets and the embodied, intuited ways of knowing. One of the…
Hayabusa2 collected 5.4 g of samples from the asteroid (162173) Ryugu and brought them back to Earth. Obtaining multiband images of these samples with the spectral bands comparable to those used for remote-sensing observations is important…
We review the development of dust science from the first ground-based astronomical observations of dust in space to compositional analysis of individual dust particles and their source objects. A multitude of observational techniques is…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…