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Asteroid families: properties, recent advances, and future opportunities

Nesvorný, David; Novaković, Bojan; Spoto, Federica +1 more

Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collision still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and have been in the focus of planetary scientists for more than a century. Most of them are located in the main belt…

Gaia-DR2 asteroid observations and INPOP planetary ephemerides

Laskar, J.; Fienga, A.; Gastineau, M. +2 more

We used the INPOP19a planetary ephemerides to perform the orbital adjustment of 14099 asteroids based on Gaia-DR2 observations and compare for 23 of them the resulting orbits to radar data. As Gaia-DR2 has been processed using the planetary ephemeris INPOP10e, the primary goal of this paper is to confirm the portability of the data when using an u…

Report of the IAU Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements: 2015

Oberst, J.; A'Hearn, M. F.; Klioner, S. A. +15 more

This report continues the practice where the IAU Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements revises recommendations regarding those topics for the planets, satellites, minor planets, and comets approximately every 3 years. The Working Group has now become a "functional working group" of the IAU, and its membership is open to…

Addressing some critical aspects of the BepiColombo MORE relativity experiment

Schettino, Giulia; Serra, Daniele; Tommei, Giacomo +1 more

The Mercury Orbiter Radio science Experiment (MORE) is one of the experiments on-board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, to be launched in October 2018. Thanks to full on-board and on-ground instrumentation performing very precise tracking from the Earth, MORE will have the chance to determine with very high accuracy the Mercury-centric…

Quantification of tidal parameters from Solar System data

Lainey, Valéry

Tidal dissipation is the main driver of orbital evolution of natural satellites and a key point to understand the exoplanetary system configurations. Despite its importance, its quantification from observations still remains difficult for most objects of our own Solar System. In this work, we overview the method that has been used to determine, di…

Rotational modeling of Hyperion

Thomas, Peter C.; Harbison, Rebecca A.; Nicholson, Philip C.

Saturn's moon, Hyperion, is subject to strongly-varying solid body torques from its primary and lacks a stable spin state resonant with its orbital frequency. In fact, its rotation is chaotic, with a Lyapunov timescale on the order of 100 days. In 2005, Cassini made three close passes of Hyperion at intervals of 40 and 67 days, when the moon was i…

Some ring-shaped potentials as a generalized 4-D isotropic oscillator. Periodic orbits

Tresaco, Eva; Ferrer, Sebastián

A generalized integrable biparametric family of 4-D isotropic oscillators is proposed. It allows to treat in a unified way, Pöschl-Teller, Hartmann and other ring-shaped systems. This approach, based in the use of two canonical extensions, helps to simplify the studies of classical aspects of those systems. As an illustration, an analysis of the p…

Michael Perryman: Astronomical applications of Astrometry: Ten years of exploitation of the Hipparcos satellite data. Cambridge University Press, 2009

Kovalevsky, Jean

Titan's rotational state. The effects of a forced ``free'' resonant wobble

Noyelles, Benoît

In Noyelles et al. (Astron. Astrophys. 478, 959–970 (2008)), a resonance involving the wobble of Titan is hinted at. This paper studies this scenario and its consequences. The first step is to build an accurate analytical model that would help to find the likely resonances in the rotation of every synchronous body. In this model, I take the orbita…

On the rotational dynamics of Prometheus and Pandora

Melnikov, A. V.; Shevchenko, I. I.

Possible rotation states of two satellites of Saturn, Prometheus (S16) and Pandora (S17), are studied by means of numerical experiments. The attitude stability of all possible modes of synchronous rotation and the motion close to these modes is analyzed by means of computation of the Lyapunov spectra of the motion. The stability analysis confirms …