solar perturbations dominate. Since the detailed mass distribution within the asteroid is relatively unimportant in We introduce a new analytic method for treating the orbital motions of objects about asteroids and planets. For an asteroid this regime, orbits about one asteroid are similar to those following a circular path around the Sun, we rewrite Jacobi’s about another as long as the eccent...

Directed energy laser ablation at the surface of an asteroid or comet produces an ejection plume that will impart a thrust on the asteroid. This thrust can mitigate a threatened collision with the Earth. This technique uses the asteroid itself as the deflection propellant. The DESTAR laser system is designed to produce a sufficiently intense spot on the surface of an asteroid to accomplish this...

Research in asteroid detection and orbital characterization has identified a new class of possible natural disaster. Asteroids are the only known type of natural disaster that could potentially destroy civilization. The societal importance of asteroid detection is assumed to be high, given the destructive capacity of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). This paper offers a decision analysis ...

The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has allowed us to create a new global picture of the Main Asteroid Belt. Put in context with meteorite measurements and dynamical models, a new and more complete ...

Since first becoming available for astronomical research in the early 1980s, charge-coupleddevice (CCD) spectrographs have had a profound impact on our ability to measure the spectralreflectance properties of asteroids. High signal-to-noise, low-resolution spectra, covering the visible-wavelength region from 0.4 to 1.0 μm, are now routinely obtained for asteroids much fainter than were measured...

Near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 1566 Icarus ( = a 1.08 au, e=0.83, =  i 22 .8) made a close approach to Earth in 2015 June at 22 lunar distances (LD). Its detection during the 1968 approach (16 LD) was the first in the history of asteroid radar astronomy. A subsequent approach in 1996 (40 LD) did not yield radar images. We describe analyses of our 2015 radar observations of Icarus obtained at the ...

A cratered asteroid acts somewhat like a retroflector, sending light and infrared radiation back toward the Sun, while thermal inertia in a rotating asteroid causes the infrared radiation to peak over the “afternoon” part. In this paper a rotating, cratered asteroid model is described, and used to generate infrared fluxes which are then interpreted using the Near Earth Asteroid Thermal Model (N...

Asteroid impacts on or near the earth are a serious and ongoing problem. Impacts of considerable sizes can cause millions of dollars in damage and result in many human casualties. The DE-STAR [1][5][6](Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation) project aims to solve this issue by utilizing the asteroid in question. The idea behind this project is to use a directed energy...

Dramatic alteration of an asteroid’s morphology need not involve high energy impacts between bodies. Simple sunlight shining on an asteroid can, through the YORP effect, cause it to undergo dramatic reconfigurations, fission into a binary asteroid or, in some cases, even undergo a catastrophic disruption with the asteroid losing up to 20% of its initial mass. The YORP effect has recently been d...

Meteorite studies suggest that each solar system object has a unique oxygen isotopic composition. Chondrites, the most primitive of meteorites, have been believed to be derived from asteroids, but oxygen isotopic compositions of asteroids themselves have not been established. We measured, using secondary ion mass spectrometry, oxygen isotopic compositions of rock particles from asteroid 25143 I...