In the news: Some Asteroids Live in Own 'Little World'

[higginsdj]

http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/11335e94d14fe23de65b3cbbabd145dc.ht ml

http://www.praguemonitor.com/2010/08/27/researchers-make-unique-discovery-asteroids

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7310/abs/nature09315.html

The world of Binaries and Asteroid Pairs....

Cheers

David

[renormalised]

It's a very interesting field, the study of asteroids, and there's a lot more we have to learn about them and they way they behave.

Needs more probes....NASA needs a lot more funding!!!!.

[rally]

David,

Followed the links in the recent posts to find this one !

Its all quite interesting stuff.
Keep posting please.

Does this mean your research and binary confirmations are used by those researchers ?

Cheers

Rally

[higginsdj]

Well it isn't my research - I just participate as an observer - a provider of data :)

Binary Asteroids have become an 'easy' target for others to latch onto after the extensive work undertaken by Petr Pravec, Alan Harris and David Vokrouhlicky to find methods in uncovering their nature then putting the data together to unearth things such as the spin limit and what that actually meant and how it tied into YORP and then modeled it all to showed a likely means of producing binaries (other than the collision or capture models which just didn't work for small bodies) and then uncovering another mechanism that allowed for the binaries to split to become asteroid pairs.

Its been an amazing journey being part of the team seeing this all evolve over the past decade out of predominantly amateur supplied data :)

Cheers