DELL'ORO , Aldo

The Gaia space mission to be operated in early 2012 by the European Space Agency (ESA), will make a huge step in our knowledge of the Sun's neighbor-hood, up to the Magellanic clouds. Somewhat closer, Gaia will also provide ma jor improvements in the science of asteroids, and more generally to our Solar System, either directly or indirectly....

Thermal inertia determines the temperature distribution over the surface of an asteroid and therefore governs the magnitude the Yarkovsky effect. The latter causes gradual drifting of the orbits of km-sized asteroids and plays an important role in the delivery of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) from the main belt and in the dynamical spreading of...

There have been attempts in the past to fit the observed bulk shapes (axial ratios) of asteroids to theoretical equilibrium figures for fluids, but these attempts have not been successful in many cases, evidently because asteroids are not fluid bodies. So far, however, the observed distribution of asteroid macroscopic shapes has never been...