FERRARI , Fabio

Multiple sources of evidence suggest that asteroids ranging from hundreds meters to few kilometers in size are rubble piles, i.e. gravitational aggregates of loosely consolidated material. However, no direct data on their internal structure is available to date. Cohesion between rubble-pile building blocks has been invoked in the past to...

Previous efforts have modeled the Didymos system as two irregularly shaped rigid bodies, although it is likely that one or both components are in fact rubble piles. Here, we relax the rigid-body assumption to quantify how this affects the spin and orbital dynamics of the system following the DART impact. Given the known fundamental differences...