This chapter summarizes the achievements over the last decade in understanding the effect of mean-motion resonances on asteroid orbits. The developments from the beginning of the 1990s are many. They range from a complete theoretical description of the secular dynamics in the mean-motion resonances associated with the Kirkwood gaps to the discovery of the threebody resonances and slow chaotic p...

The Mobile Asteroid Scout (MASCOT) is a small lander on board the Hayabusa2 mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to the asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Among the instruments on MASCOT is a fluxgate magnetometer, the MASCOT Magnetometer (MasMag). The magnetometer is a lightweight (∼ 280 g) and low power (∼ 0.5 W) triaxial fluxgate magnetometer. Magnetic field measurements during the landing ...

The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)–Shoemaker mission was a milestone in that it represented the practical navigation of a spacecraft in the most severely perturbed orbital environment (relative to the standard two-body problem) ever experienced by a spacecraft. Furthermore, all future asteroid orbital missions will encounter environments similar, in some way, to the environment encounter...

The presence of asteroid bodies in the vitreous, designated asteroid hyalopathy by Rodman, Johnson, and Zimmerman (i 96 I), is an interesting but rare condition of obscure aetiology. In spite of the presence of these vitreous opacities, there is hardly any deterioration in the acuity of vision, hence the paucity of available pathological material for study and analysis. Many diseases have been ...

In the last few years, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, a major breakthrough has been achieved in our understanding of the processes involved in small body collisions. In this review, we summarize the most recent results provided by numerical simulations, accounting for both the fragmentation of an asteroid and the gravitational interactions of the generated fragments...

Asteroids can be eclipsed by other bodies in the Solar System, but no direct observation of an asteroid eclipse has been reported to date. We describe a statistical method to predict an eclipse for an asteroid based on the analysis of the orbital elements covariance matrix. By propagating a set of Virtual Asteroids to an epoch correspondent to a close approach with a Solar System planet or natu...

An international observing campaign was organized to determine the physical and chemical characteristics of asteroid 4979 Otawara, which is the first target of the Rosetta mission (flyby on July 10, 2006). Knowledge of the physical parameters of the flyby targets is required for both refinement of the design of the spacecraft and the instrument payload, and optimization of the mission trajector...

Introduction: Taxonomic classification of asteroids based on their visible / near-ir spectra or multi band photometry has proven to be a useful tool to infer other properties about asteroids. Meteorite analogs have been identified for several taxonomic classes, permitting detailed inference about asteroid composition [1], [2]. Trends have been identified between taxonomy and measured asteroid d...

This paper presents the design of a multi-spacecraft system for the deflection of asteroids. Each spacecraft is equipped with a fibre laser and a solar concentrator. The laser induces the sublimation of a portion of the surface of the asteroid, and the resultant jet of gas and debris thrusts the asteroid off its natural course. The main idea is to have a formation of spacecraft flying in the pr...

Introduction: Mineralogy is the key to determining the compositional history of the asteroids and to determining the genetic relationships between the asteroids and meteorites. The most sophisticated remote mineralogical characterizations involve the quantitative extraction of specific diagnostic parameters from reflectance spectra and the use of quantitative interpre-tive calibrations to deter...