This paper studies the dynamics of a spacecraft moving in the field of a binary asteroid. The asteroid pair is modeled as a rigid body and a sphere moving in a plane, while the spacecraft moves in space under the influence of the gravitational field of the asteroid pair, as well as that of the Sun. This simple model captures the coupling between rotational and translational dynamics. By assumin...

STAR-sHAPED INCLUIONS have been observed in multinucleated giant cells as far back as 1890.1 Perhaps the most comprehensive study of the asteroid bodies, as seen under the light microscope is that of Cunnngham' who e d in 1951 that "in tests for collagen, Masson's trichrome stain and Mallory's connective tissue stain showed negative results. Wilder's stain for reticuhlm wa uni negative. Cunning...

Aims. We investigate the possibility that the observed sea-otter shape of the asteroid Itokawa, associated with the presence of big boulders on its surface, originates from the reaccumulation process that may have formed this asteroid, assuming that it consists of reaccumulated fragments from a catastrophically disrupted parent body. Methods. We computed the gravitational phase of an asteroid d...

We use numerical simulations to investigate the production of dust trails by asteroid disruption events. Our work shows that asteroid trails evolve into pairs of dust bands over time. Coherent trails typically survive several tens of kyr before evolving into complete bands after 1Myr. The transition timescale depends sensitively on the location of the source breakup event in the main asteroid b...

A systematic exploration of the chaotic structure of the asteroid belt is presented, first taking into account only the perturbations provided by the four giant planets and then including also the effects of the inner planets. We find that both the inner belt (a< 2.5 AU) and the outer part of the main belt (a> 2.8 AU) are mostly chaotic. In the outer part of the belt, chaos is due to the presen...

New data from observations of asteroid mutual perturbation events, observations of asteroid satellites, and spacecraft encounters have revolutionized our understanding of asteroid bulk density. Most asteroids appear to have bulk densities that are well below the grain density of their likely meteorite analogs. This indicates that many asteroids have significant porosity. High porosity attenuate...

The long-standing uncertainty about the importance of asteroid-generated tsunami was addressed at a workshop in August 2016, co-sponsored by NASA and NOAA. Experts from NASA (Ames, JPL), NOAA, DoE (LLNL, SNL, LANL), DHS, FEMA, and academia addressed the hazard of tsunami created by asteroid impacts, focusing primarily on impacting NEAs with diameter <250m. Participants jointly identified key is...

In this paper we focus on the stability of the Trojan asteroids for the planar Restricted Three-Body Problem (RTBP), by extending the usual techniques for the neighbourhood of an elliptic point to derive results in a larger vicinity. Our approach is based on the numerical determination of the frequencies of the asteroid and the effective computation of the Kolmogorov normal form for the corresp...