Description
Organisers: Abbie Donaldson, Alan Fitzsimmons, Charlotte Gรถtz, Agata Roลผek, Colin Snodgrass
The formation and migration history of the Solar System is encoded in remnant planetary disc material, known to us as the diverse populations of minor planets. These objects make compelling and informative targets for spacecraft encounters, and in recent years major scientific advances have been possible with data returned by missions such as DAWN, Rosetta, and New Horizons. A host of current and upcoming missions will further revolutionise our understanding of the Solar Systemโs structure and history e.g. the characterisation of numerous Jupiter Trojans by the Lucy flybys, the Hera mission to assess the Didymos-Dimorphos system following the DART impact, and the first ever up-close study of a dynamically new comet by Comet Interceptor.
Our ability to characterise small bodies remotely is also rapidly improving. JWST and powerful ground-based facilities can now probe the compositions of objects and their atmospheres from near-Earth space through to the trans-Neptunian region. The imminent Legacy Survey of Space and Time will discover millions of small bodies across the entire Solar System, providing long-term monitoring and capturing transient events like activity and collisions. The ability of the forthcoming 39-m ELT to characterise distant Solar System objects will be entirely unprecedented. This wealth of observed properties will inform current and new theoretical models of planetary formation and evolution.
In this highly exciting time for small body science, we welcome presentations from researchers working on any and all minor planet populations including relevant missions, new observations, or theoretical studies.
The last decade has seen the advent of large field of view Integral Field Spectrographs (IFUs) for observations at optical wavelengths. These instruments, such as MUSE on the 8-m Very Large Telescope, present an interesting opportunity to characterize the distant activity of comets, due to the combination of spatial and spectral information they provide. Large scale IFUs on ground-based...
Following ESAโs Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) from 2014-2016, we conducted hyperspectral observations with the Very Large Telescopeโs (VLT) Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument during its 2021โ2022 apparition. These observations span two seasons on 67P, and perihelion, enabling simultaneous mapping of the dust coma and gaseous species evolution,...
This study presents findings from narrowband imaging of comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) using the 3.6-meter New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile. Observations commenced on January 27, 2007, 15 days after perihelion, and continued until February 4, with additional sessions from February 25 to 28. Imaging was conducted using the ESO Multi-Mode Instrument (EMMI) in both broadband (BV R)...
In the classical theory of planetesimal differentiation, a body would form an iron-rich core, an olivine-dominated mantle, and a pyroxene-rich basaltic crust. The detection of differentiated bodies in the current asteroid main belt will allow us to get insights and study the very initial phases of planetesimal accretion.
Asteroid (22) Kalliope is the densest known asteroid with โด=4.4ยฑ0.46...
The size distribution of early solar system planetesimals remains poorly understood. Accurate knowledge of this size distribution is crucial for developing more sophisticated solar system formation models. Asteroids are fragments of primordial planetesimals that broke off during collisional events, forming asteroid families, or are surviving planetesimals themselves. By identifying and...
Bi-lobed objects (contact binaries) consist of between 15-30% of near-Earth objects (NEOs) and also appear in the main asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, and comet populations. Notable contact binaries include Itokawa - visited by the Hayabusa mission, Selam - visited by the LUCY mission, and 67P which was visited by the Rosetta mission. We use archival radar observations in combination with optical...
Interstellar objects (ISOs) are physical samples of distant planetary systems, forming a Galaxy-spanning population, constantly streaming through the inner Solar system for us to study. In preparation for the imminent completion of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, an ongoing targeted precursor survey on CFHT and the upcoming launch of the NEOSurveyor mission, we present a novel simulation of ISO...
The formation and migration history of the Solar System is encoded in remnant disc material. Comets are small, kilometre-sized planetesimals and as such are best characterised in situ. Only short period comets have thus far been studied by space missions - by nature, these comets have evolved substantially throughout repeated perihelion passages in the inner Solar System, where temperatures...
2006 WB is an asteroid with a diameter of approximately 100m and a rotation period of approximately 10 hours (Ticha et al. 2006). During the closest approach of this target in November 2024, when is was at a distance of within 0.0059 AU (2.3 lunar distances), we made a successful detection of the radar echo using bistatic radar with transmission from DSS-63 at NASAโs Madrid Deep Space...
We present near-infrared integral-field-unit spectroscopic observations of the recently discovered long period comet C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos) taken with the JWST and NIRSpec. These give a first look at the evolving drivers of cometary activity as this comet approaches the Sun, with observations taken at 7au and additional epochs planned at 5au and 3au during this year. In the first epoch we find...
