Related papers: 1620 Geographos and 433 Eros: Shaped by Planetary …
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
Numerical modeling has long suggested that gravitationally-bound (or so-called rubble-pile) near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) can be destroyed by tidal forces during close and slow encounters with terrestrial planets. However, tidal disruptions…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
Tumbling asteroids belong to a small group of objects, whose angular velocity vector is unaligned with any of its principal axes of inertia. This leads to challenging efforts to model the trajectory of any spacecraft designed to orbit these…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
Spectral characterization of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has revealed a continuum of space-weathered states for the surfaces of S-complex NEAs, with Q-class NEAs, an S-complex subclass, most closely matching the un-weathered surfaces of…
Asteroid (99942) Apophis' close approach in 2029 will be one of the most significant small-body encounter events in the near future and offers a good opportunity for in situ exploration to determine the asteroid's surface properties and…
In 2029, the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis approaches the Earth within six Earth radii. This opportunity is one of the rarest natural experiments that we can use to better characterize a small body through telescopic observations and…
The orbital dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting around irregular small celestial bodies is a challenging problem. Difficulties to model the gravity field of these bodies arise from the poor knowledge of the exact shape as observed from the…
During close approaches to planets or stars, the morphological and dynamical properties of rubble-pile small bodies can be modified, and some may catastrophically break up. This phenomenon is of particular interest for understanding the…
The Yarkovsky (orbital drift) and YORP (spin state change) effects play important roles in the dynamical and physical evolution of asteroids. Thermophysical modelling of these observed effects, and of thermal-infrared observations, allows a…
Close encounters of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with large asteroids are a possible source of systematic errors in trajectory propagations and asteroid mitigation. It is, thus, necessary to identify those large asteroids that have to be…
Many asteroids are rubble piles with irregular shapes. While the irregular shapes of large asteroids may be attributed to collisional events, those of small asteroids may result from not only impact events but also rotationally induced…
We numerically investigate how an asteroid's elongation controls the sensitivity of its surface to tidal effects during a distant planetary encounter beyond the Roche limit. We analyze the surface slope and its variation by considering the…
Many small bodies in the solar system are believed to be rubble piles, a collection of smaller elements separated by voids. We propose a model for the structure of a self-gravitating rubble pile. Static friction prevents its elements from…
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…
Asteroids are frequently colliding with small projectiles. Although each individual small collision is not very important, their cumulative effect can substantially change topography and also the overall shape of an asteroid. We run…
On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. Numerical simulations of the impact provide a means to…
An asteroid pair consists of two unbound objects with almost identical heliocentric orbital elements that were formed when a single "rubble pile" asteroid failed to remain bound against an increasing rotation rate. Models suggest that the…
The overall shape, internal structure and surface morphology of small bodies such as asteroids and comets are determined to a large degree by the last global-scale impact or disruption event. Depending on the specific energy, impacts lead…