Commission F4 Asteroids, Comets & Transneptunian Objects

News

DART IMPACT: September 26, 2022

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is the first space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor.

https://dart.jhuapl.edu/News-and-Resources/index.php

Highlights in asteroids, comets & TNOs study in 2021

EVENTS:

The marvelous and successful launches of two asteroid missions, Lucy to Trojan asteroids and DART to the binary Didymos.

Lucy will provide first detailed data on asteroids from which we have no meteorite analogue and therefore open a new window on our Solar system history.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lucy/overview/index

DART will perform an impact in a binary asteroid system at a speed that is close to the average one between asteroids, and will change the orbit of the moon Dimorphos around its primary body Didymos. DART will return images until it impacted Dimorphos, and the results will be observed from Earth-based telescopes and an Italian cubesat named LICIACube, released by DART several days prior to arrival. The ESA Hera mission will rendezvous with the Didymos system to investigate in details the impact outcome in a few years. These missions will allow us to test our asteroid collision models, refine surface chronologies with appropriate scaling rules and feed with parameters at correct scale the collisional evolution models of asteroid populations. https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart/dart-news, https://www.heramission.space/

Ongoing analysis of asteroid Ryugu’s samples after the success of the Jaxa Hayabusa2 sample returning mission https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01550-6

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission completed in-situ study of asteroid Bennu and is on its way back to Earth with the asteroid’s samples. https://www.asteroidmission.org/latest-news/

Successful test of a multi-static radar intended to expand the scientific reach and capability of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)/ The test proved that a new radio telescope system can capture high-resolution images in near-Earth space https://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/37417-a-planetary-radar-system-for-detection-and-high-resolution-imaging-of-nearby-celestial-bodies

successful international campaigns devoted to the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis organized by International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) Campaign https://iawn.net/obscamp/Apophis/index.shtml

https://az659834.vo.msecnd.net/eventsairwesteuprod/production-atpi-public/64851a6caad54fbbb59e7724f7f89bc4

The Pluto System after New Horizons (2021, University of Arizona Press) distills, in 688 pages, our understanding of Pluto, its moons, its place in the Kuiper Belt, and thoughts for ongoing exploration. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/the-pluto-system-after-new-horizons

PUBLICATIONS:

More than 1600 peer-reviewed papers were published in 2021 according to NASA-ADS database, including ~900 papers on asteroids, ~330 papers on comets, and ~370 papers on TNOs and Pluto. The most popular topics were investigations of near-Earth asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, and Pluto.

SOME RESULTS:

Discovery of the presence of exogenic boulders on the surface of near-Earth asteroids (101955) Bennu https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1195-z and (162173) Ryugu https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1179-z

The reconstruction of 3D shapes of asteroids using VLT observations that demonstrated the increasing capabilities of Earth-based observations of asteroids https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/10/aa41781-21/aa41781-21.html

Possible mechanism of activity of near-Earth asteroid (3200) Phaethon was proposed https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac0d02

Lunar-like silicate material found on the Earth quasi-satellite (469219) Kamo`oalewa https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html

Increasing data on the optical color measurements reveled a different surface color distribution of the binary and single cold classical KBOs https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abf04a/pdf

The long duration observations from the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) revealed early activity in the giant comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli–Bernstein https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac323d The very large size of the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was confirmed https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13188

The discovery of the atoms of iron and nickel in the cold coma of Solar system comets https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03435-0 and the first interstellar comet 2I/ Borisov https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03485-4.

The detection of deuterated methanol in the coma of comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko points to its prestellar origins https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/500/4/4901/5948105

Pluto’s haze is bimodal in size, follows both Titan-like and Triton-like formation, and may control the temperature of Pluto’s lower atmosphere https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01270-3, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27811-6.