Planetary defense efforts rely on estimates of the mechanical properties of asteroids, which
are difficult to constrain accurately from Earth. The mechanical properties of asteroid …

Small bodies are among the best tracers of our Solar System's history. A large number of
space missions to small bodies (past and future) offer a unique opportunity to use these …

Asteroid interiors play a key role in our understanding of asteroid formation and evolution.
As no direct interior probing has been done yet, characterisation of asteroids' interiors relies …

An increasing number of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) in the range of a few hundred metres
to a few kilometres in size have relatively high spin rates, from less than 4 h, down to∼ 2.2 h …

Landing on small bodies like asteroids encounters great rebound uncertainties, which
threatens the surface exploration and operation. This paper explores a potential solution for …

Investigating the impact process between the hopping lander and the regolith surfaces is of
great significance for the in situ asteroid explorations. The high-efficiency description of the …

Multiple sources of evidence suggest that asteroids ranging from hundreds meters to few
kilometers in size are rubble piles, ie gravitational aggregates of loosely consolidated …

Asteroids are scientific windows for understanding the universe while having enormous
economic value. Instead of merely bringing back a small sample, capturing an asteroid into …

In this work, we employ a soft-sphere discrete element method with a cohesion
implementation to model the dynamical process of sub-km-sized cohesive rubble piles …

Context. The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effect plays an important
role in the rotational properties and evolution of asteroids. While the YORP effect induced by …