Some active asteroids have been proposed to be formed as a result of impact events1. Because active asteroids are generally discovered by chance only after their tails have fully formed, the process of how impact ejecta evolve into a tail has, to our knowledge, not been directly observed. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission of NASA2, in addition to having successfully changed the orbital period of Dimorphos3, demonstrated the activation process of an asteroid resulting from an impact under precisely known conditions. Here we report the observations of the DART impact ejecta with the Hubble Space Telescope from impact time T + 15 min to T + 18.5 days at spatial resolutions of around 2.1 km per pixel. Our observations reveal the complex evolution of the ejecta, which are first dominated by the gravitational interaction between the Didymos binary system and the ejected dust and subsequently by solar radiation pressure. The lowest-speed ejecta dispersed through a sustained tail that had a consistent morphology with previously observed asteroid tails thought to be produced by an impact4,5. The evolution of the ejecta after the controlled impact experiment of DART thus provides a framework for understanding the fundamental mechanisms that act on asteroids disrupted by a natural impact1,6.
The discovery of the first interstellar object (ISO) passing through the Solar System, 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua), provoked intense and continuing interest from the scientific community and the general public. The faintness of 'Oumuamua, together with the limited time window within which observations were possible, constrained the information available on its dynamics and physical state. Some
The design, development and calibration of an impact force transducer or penetrometer, for use on the Huygens spacecraft scheduled to land on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, is described, The thumb-sized transducer employs a piezoelectric sensing element and is capable of working at cryogenic temperatures. Use of the sensor on a spacecraft imposes several reliability and safely constraints, as well as the desire to minimize mass (the sensor mass is 15 9). The impact force profile, measured at 10 kHz by the sensor, allows estimation of the density and cohesion of the surface material, and its palticle size distribution. Sample profiles for terrestrial materials (sand, gravel and clay) are given.
A foundational goal of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to map the Solar System small body populations that provide key windows into understanding of its formation and evolution (Ivezić et al., 2008; LSST Science Collaboration et al., 2009). This is especially true of the populations of the Outer Solar System -objects at the orbit of Neptune r > 30 AU and beyond.In this whitepaper, we propose a minimal change to the LSST cadence that can greatly enhance LSST's ability to discover faint distant Solar System objects across the entire wide-fast-deep (WFD) survey area. Specifically, we propose that the WFD cadence be constrained so as to deliver least one sequence of 10 visits per year taken in a ∼ 10 day period in any combination of g, r, and i bands. Combined with advanced shift-and-stack algorithms (e.g. Whidden et al., 2019) this modification would enable a nearly complete census of the outer Solar System to ∼ 25.5 magnitude, yielding 4 − 8x more KBO discoveries than with single-epoch baseline, and enabling rapid identification and follow-up of unusual distant Solar System objects in 5x greater volume of space.These increases would enhance the science cases discussed in Schwamb et al. 2018 whitepaper, including probing Neptune's past migration history as well as discovering hypothesized planet(s) beyond the orbit of Neptune (or at least placing significant constraints on their existence).
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