Related papers: The impact hazard from small asteroids: current pr…
Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…
Analytical approximations are commonly employed in the initial trajectory design phase of a mission to rapidly explore a broad design space. In the context of an asteroid deflection mission, accurately predicting deflection is crucial to…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…
The surfaces of solid objects in our planetary system are dappled with craters. Some of them are due to impacts of various solid projectiles into the surfaces of the objects. A smaller part of these craters is of volcanic origin. %Some of…
Observations with radar, photometric and direct imaging techniques have discovered that multiple asteroid systems can be divided clearly into a handful of different morphologies, and recently, the discovery of small unbound asteroid systems…
The damage and fracture of materials are technologically of enormous interest due to their economic and human cost. They cover a wide range of phenomena like e.g. cracking of glass, aging of concrete, the failure of fiber networks in the…
The dynamical and physical properties of asteroid family members are widely used to reconstruct the collisional evolution of the main belt and of individual objects. Families offer insights into the properties of the parent bodies and the…
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…
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…
While almost all potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) with a size larger than one kilometre have been discovered, it is well-known that the vast majority of the smaller ones are in fact yet to be found. There is therefore an excellent…
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments,…
The study of protostellar collapse or infall has proven unusually difficult and controversial. Some historical context will be provided, against which recent advances can be measured. We now have a substantial number of objects with…
The internal structure and strength of small asteroids and large meteoroids is poorly known. Observation of bright fireballs in the Earth's atmosphere can prospect meteoroid structure by studying meteoroid fragmentation during the flight.…
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…
Orbit-determination programs find the orbit solution that best fits a set of observations by minimizing the RMS of the residuals of the fit. For near-Earth asteroids, the uncertainty of the orbit solution may be compatible with trajectories…
We have calculated 90% confidence limits on the steady-state rate of catastrophic disruptions of main belt asteroids in terms of the absolute magnitude at which one catastrophic disruption occurs per year (HCL) as a function of the…
The computation of the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID) is an old, but increasingly relevant problem. Fast and precise methods for MOID computation are needed to select potentially hazardous asteroids from a large catalogue. The…
An asteroid family forms as a result of a collision between an impactor and a parent body. The fragments with ejection speeds higher than the escape velocity from the parent body can escape its gravitational pull. The cloud of escaping…
This work presents the model of an ejecta cloud distribution to characterise the plume generated by the impact of a projectile onto asteroids surfaces. A continuum distribution based on the combination of probability density functions is…
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…