IEVA , S.

Context. The ESA JUICE space mission, on its way to study Jupiter's environment and icy moons, will pass twice through the main asteroid belt. For this reason, the possibility to perform an asteroid flyby has been investigated.Aims. We aim to gain insight into the physical properties of the outer main belt asteroid (223) Rosa, which has been...

We performed photometric observations of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos in support of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that will test the Kinetic Impactor technology for diverting dangerous asteroids. It will hit the Didymos secondary, called Dimorphos, on 2022 September 26. We observed Didymos with 11...

Spacecraft observations revealed that rocks on carbonaceous asteroids, which constitute the most numerous class by composition, can develop millimeter-to-meter-scale fractures due to thermal stresses. However, signatures of this process on the second-most populous group of asteroids, the S-complex, have been poorly constrained. Here, we report...

Asteroids smaller than 10 km are thought to be rubble piles formed from the reaccumulation of fragments produced in the catastrophic disruption of parent bodies. Ground-based observations reveal that some of these asteroids are today binary systems, in which a smaller secondary orbits a larger primary asteroid. However, how these asteroids...