Search Publications
Assessing Martian bedrock mineralogy through "windows" in the dust using near-infrared and thermal infrared remote sensing
Horgan, Briony; Bell, James F., III; Lai, Jason C. +1 more
Much of Mars' surface is mantled by bright dust, which masks the spectral features used to interpret the mineralogy of the underlying bedrock. Despite the wealth of near-infrared (NIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) data returned from orbiting spacecraft in recent decades, the detailed bedrock composition of approximately half of the Martian surface r…
Measurement of plasma channels in the Venus wake
Lundin, R.; Futaana, Y.; Zhang, T. L. +1 more
Plasma channels have been suggested to account for the observation of ionospheric holes in the Venus nightside ionosphere. They are produced by the erosion of the solar wind on the magnetic polar regions of the Venus ionosphere, and are related to a sharp plasma transition that extends along the flanks of the wake and that is located downstream fr…
Automatic endmember bundle unmixing methodology for lunar regional area mineral mapping
Yin, Jihao; Huang, Chenyu; Luo, Xiaoyan +1 more
The mineral distribution on lunar surface can contribute to studying lunar evolution, while abundance quantification is still challenging. Unmixing on spectral reflectance data is an effective way for mineral resource explanation, especially in hardly accessible area. In regional area unmixing, some existing unmixing models mainly rely on spectral…
The evolution of gently sloping mantled deposits on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Kossacki, Konrad J.; Jasiak, Aleksander
We investigated the role of local illumination and material parameters that can be important in determining evolution of a gently inclined slopes on the nucleus of comet. The considered material parameters are: size of ice grains, agglomerates and pores in-between, thermal conductivity of dust mantle, size of pores in the dust mantle, presence of …
Inertia parameter statistics of an uncertain small body shape
Bercovici, Benjamin; McMahon, Jay W.
This paper proposes an analytical formulation of the inertia parameters of Bezier shapes of arbitrary order. Bezier shapes can represent classical polyhedra as well as higher-order surface elements within the same framework. This formulation is linearized so as to yield the expressions of the first variation in the inertia properties of interest. …
Global spectrophotometric properties of Asteroid (21) Lutetia using Rosetta-OSIRIS images
Masoumzadeh, N.; Boehnhardt, H.
We present a spectrophotometric analysis of the surface areas of asteroid (21) Lutetia that were imaged during the Rosetta flyby on July 2010 by the OSIRIS camera in the wavelength range 269 to 989 nm. A spectral slope change with respect to phase angle is found and interpreted as being due to areal diversity of Lutetia's surface. We applied Minna…
Measuring the Yarkovsky effect with Las Cumbres Observatory
Lister, Tim; Farnocchia, Davide; Greenstreet, Sarah
The Las Cumbres Observatory (LCOGT) provides an ideal platform for follow-up and characterization of Solar System objects (e.g. asteroids, Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), comets, and near-Earth objects (NEOs)) as well as for the discovery of new objects. The LCOGT network allows for regular monitoring of a sample of targets, such as that of NEOs for w…
Large-scale, sub-tropical cloud activity near Titan's 1995 equinox
Lorenz, R. D.; Caldwell, J. J.; Lemmon, M. T. +1 more
We report observations of Titan using 190 images from the Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 and NICMOS over 4 oppositions of Titan 1994-1997. Analysis of these images yields maps of surface brightness at 0.67, 0.94, and 1.08 µm that compare well with Cassini data, plus some transient features that are interpreted as large cloud systems. These sys…
Reprint of "Evidence for color dichotomy in the primordial Neptunian Trojan population"
Smith, M.; D'Andrea, C. B.; Abbott, T. M. C. +45 more
In the current model of early Solar System evolution, the stable members of the Jovian and Neptunian Trojan populations were captured into resonance from the leftover reservoir of planetesimals during the outward migration of the giant planets. As a result, both Jovian and Neptunian Trojans share a common origin with the primordial disk population…
Identification of the SMART-1 spacecraft impact location on the Moon
Stooke, P. J.
The impact site of the European Space Agency SMART-1 lunar orbiter was identified in Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Camera (LROC) images. No pre-impact image of adequate resolution is available for confirmation, but the form of the impact feature and its ejecta, its proximity to the expected location and the absence of any other obvious candid…