Search Publications
Can Well-sampled Phase Curves Be Used to Infer Asteroid Spectral Features?
Murray, Zachary
The relationship of an asteroid's reduced magnitude to its phase has a long history of study. Included in this history have been efforts to study the correlation between these parameters and spectral type. However, these efforts often suffer from the inclusion of only a few asteroids, missing phase curve data, uncorrected rotational or apparitiona…
Ground-based Characterization of (98943) Torifune 2001 CC21, the Target of the Hayabusa2# Space Mission
Tatsumi, Eri; de León, Julia; Licandro, Javier +11 more
The near-Earth asteroid (98943) Torifune, previously designated 2001 CC21, is the flyby target of the Hayabusa2 extended mission, nicknamed Hayabusa2# (Small Hazardous Asteroid Reconnaissance Probe (SHARP)). The ground-based telescope observations offer a key science input for the mission's scientific investigation. During 2022–2024, th…
Bioverse: The Habitable Zone Inner Edge Discontinuity as an Imprint of Runaway Greenhouse Climates on Exoplanet Demographics
Apai, Dániel; Schlecker, Martin; Hardegree-Ullman, Kevin K. +3 more
Long-term magma ocean phases on rocky exoplanets orbiting closer to their star than the runaway greenhouse threshold-the inner edge of the classical habitable zone-may offer insights into the physical and chemical processes that distinguish potentially habitable worlds from others. The thermal stratification of runaway planets is expected to signi…
Photometry of the Didymos System across the DART Impact Apparition
de León, Julia; Licandro, Javier; Oszkiewicz, Dagmara +78 more
On 2022 September 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted Dimorphos, the satellite of binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This demonstrated the efficacy of a kinetic impactor for planetary defense by changing the orbital period of Dimorphos by 33 minutes. Measuring the period change relied heavily on a coordinat…
Updated Catalog of Kepler Planet Candidates: Focus on Accuracy and Orbital Periods
Lissauer, Jack J.; Rowe, Jason F.; Jontof-Hutter, Daniel +5 more
We present a new catalog of Kepler planet candidates that prioritizes accuracy of planetary dispositions and properties over uniformity. This catalog contains 4376 transiting planet candidates, including 1791 residing within 709 multiplanet systems, and provides the best parameters available for a large sample of Kepler planet candidates. We also …
The New Horizons Extended Mission Target: Arrokoth Search and Discovery
Fabbro, S.; Stern, S. Alan; Weaver, Harold A. +37 more
Following the Pluto flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft, the mission provided a unique opportunity to explore the Kuiper Belt in situ. The possibility existed to fly by a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), as well as to observe additional objects at distances closer than are feasible from Earth-orbit facilities. However, at the time of launch no KBOs were…
Long-term Monitoring of Didymos with the LCOGT Network and MRO after the DART Impact
Lister, Tim; Chatelain, Joseph; Gomez, Edward +8 more
The world's first planetary defense test mission was carried out in late 2022 by NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The main DART spacecraft, which was accompanied by the ASI-provided LICIACube cubesat, intentionally impacted Dimorphos, the smaller secondary of the near-Earth object binary system (65803) Didymos, on 2022 Septe…
The Discovery and Evolution of a Possible New Epoch of Cometary Activity by the Centaur (2060) Chiron
Fedorets, Grigori; Siverd, Robert J.; Schwamb, Megan E. +24 more
Centaurs are small solar system objects on chaotic orbits in the giant planet region, forming an evolutionary continuum with the Kuiper Belt objects and Jupiter-family comets. Some Centaurs are known to exhibit cometary activity, though unlike comets, this activity tends not to correlate with heliocentric distance, and the mechanism behind it is c…
Pre-impact Albedo Map and Photometric Properties of the (65803) Didymos Asteroid Binary System from DART and Ground-based Data
Buratti, B. J.; Sunshine, J. M.; Rivkin, A. S. +11 more
This study provides a pre-impact map of the albedo of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) target Dimorphos corrected for all the effects of viewing geometry, as well as an estimate of photometric roughness for the hemisphere imaged by DART. Other photometric properties are derived for the (65803) Didymos binary system based on DART and gro…
Detection of Close Kuiper Belt Binaries with HST WFC3
Porter, Simon B.; Verbiscer, Anne J.; Noll, Keith S. +3 more
Binaries in the Kuiper Belt are common. Here we present our analysis of the Solar System Origins Legacy Survey (SSOLS) to show that using a point-spread function (PSF)-fitting method can roughly double the number of binaries identified in that data set. Out of 198 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) observed by SSOLS, we find 23 to be visually separated bi…