Search Publications
Achievement of the Planetary Defense Investigations of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission
Buratti, Bonnie J.; Kolokolova, Ludmilla; Zinzi, Angelo +126 more
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was the first to demonstrate asteroid deflection, and the mission's Level 1 requirements guided its planetary defense investigations. Here, we summarize DART's achievement of those requirements. On 2022 September 26, the DART spacecraft impacted Dimorphos, the secondary member of the Didymos n…
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…
JWST Near-infrared Spectroscopy of the Lucy Jupiter Trojan Flyby Targets: Evidence for OH Absorption, Aliphatic Organics, and CO2
Noll, Keith S.; Grundy, William M.; Brown, Michael E. +6 more
We present observations obtained with the Near Infrared Spectrograph on JWST of the five Jupiter Trojans that will be visited by the Lucy spacecraft—the Patroclus–Menoetius binary, Eurybates, Orus, Leucus, and Polymele. The measured 1.7–5.3 µm reflectance spectra, which provide increased wavelength coverage, spatial resolution, and signal-to…
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 …
Doomed Worlds. I. No New Evidence for Orbital Decay in a Long-term Survey of 43 Ultrahot Jupiters
Huang, Chelsea X.; Sickafoose, Amanda A.; Jackson, Brian +8 more
Ultrahot Jupiters (UHJs) are likely doomed by tidal forces to undergo orbital decay and eventual disruption by their stars, but the timescale over which this process unfolds is unknown. We present results from a long-term project to monitor UHJ transits. We recovered WASP-12 b's orbital decay rate of ms yr‑1, in agreement with prior wor…
The Dynamical State of the Didymos System before and after the DART Impact
Hamilton, Douglas P.; Tanga, Paolo; Gramigna, Edoardo +50 more
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of (65803) Didymos, on 2022 September 26, as a first successful test of kinetic impactor technology for deflecting a potentially hazardous object in space. The experiment resulted in a small change to the dynamical state of the Didymos system consis…
Beyond Point Masses. III. Detecting Haumea's Nonspherical Gravitational Field
Grundy, Will M.; Oldroyd, William J.; Proudfoot, Benjamin C. N. +3 more
The dwarf planet Haumea is one of the most compelling trans-Neptunian objects to study, hosting two small, dynamically interacting satellites, a family of nearby spectrally unique objects, and a ring system. Haumea itself is extremely oblate due to its 3.9 hr rotation period. Understanding the orbits of Haumea's satellites, named Hi'iaka and Namak…
Revealing Callisto's Carbon-rich Surface and CO2 Atmosphere with JWST
de Pater, Imke; Roth, Lorenz; Malaska, Michael J. +18 more
We analyzed spectral cubes of Callisto's leading and trailing hemispheres, collected with the NIRSpec Integrated Field Unit (G395H) on the James Webb Space Telescope. These spatially resolved data show strong 4.25 µm absorption bands resulting from solid-state 12CO2, with the strongest spectral features at low latitudes…
Three-dimensional Atmospheric Dynamics of Jupiter from Ground-based Doppler Imaging Spectroscopy in the Visible
Wong, Michael H.; Izumiura, Hideyuki; Sato, Bun'ei +25 more
We present three-dimensional (3D) maps of Jupiter's atmospheric circulation at cloud-top level from Doppler-imaging data obtained in the visible domain with JIVE, the second node of the JOVIAL network, which is mounted on the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, New Mexico. We report on 12 nights of observations between 2018 May 4 and May 30, represen…