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On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted Dimorphos, the natural satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. Numerical simulations of the impact provide a means to explore target surface material properties and structures, consistent with the observed momentum deflection efficiency, ejecta cone geometry, and ejected mass. Our simulation, which best matches observations, indicates that Dimorphos is weak, with a cohesive strength of less than a few pascals (Pa), similar to asteroids (162173) Ryugu and (101955) Bennu. We find that a bulk density of Dimorphos, rhoB, lower than 2400 kg/m3, and a low volume fraction of boulders (<40 vol%) on the surface and in the shallow subsurface, are consistent with measured data from the DART experiment. These findings suggest Dimorphos is a rubble pile that might have formed through rotational mass shedding and re-accumulation from Didymos. Our simulations indicate that the DART impact caused global deformation and resurfacing of Dimorphos. ESA's upcoming Hera mission may find a re-shaped asteroid, rather than a well-defined crater.

The quest for atmospheric spectral signatures that may witness biological activity in exoplanets is focused on rocky planets. The best targets for future, challenging spectroscopic observations will be selected among potentially habitable planets. Surface habitability can be quantified and explored with climate and atmospheric models according to temperature-based criteria. The conceptual, modellistic, technological and interpretative complexity of the problem requires to develop flexible climate and atmospheric models suited for a comprehensive exploration of observationally unconstrained parameters, and to simulate and interpret definitely non-terrestrial conditions. We present a summary and preliminary results on the work we are performing on multi-parametric explorations of the habitability and observational properties of rocky planets., Comment: to appear on MemSAIt, vol 94. Proceedings of the Hack100 Conference: Past, Present and Future of Astrophysical Spectroscopy, 6-10 June 2022, Trieste, Italy

Rocky planets with temperate conditions provide the best chance for discovering habitable worlds and life outside the Solar System. In the last decades, new instrumental facilities and large observational campaigns have been driven by the quest for habitable worlds. Climate models aimed at studying the habitability of rocky planets are essential tools to pay off these technological and observational endeavours. In this context, we present EOS-ESTM, a fast and flexible model aimed at exploring the impact on habitability of multiple climate factors, including those unconstrained by observations. EOS-ESTM is built on ESTM, a seasonal-latitudinal energy balance model featuring an advanced treatment of the meridional and vertical transport. The novel features of EOS-ESTM include: (1) parameterizations for simulating the climate impact of oceans, land, ice, and clouds as a function of temperature and stellar zenith distance; (2) a procedure (EOS) for calculating the radiative transfer in atmospheres with terrestrial and non-terrestrial compositions illuminated by solar- and non-solar-type stars. By feeding EOS-ESTM with Earth's stellar, orbital and planetary parameters we derive a reference model that satisfies a large number of observational constraints of the Earth's climate system. Validation tests of non-terrestrial conditions yield predictions that are in line with comparable results obtained with a hierarchy of climate models. The application of EOS-ESTM to planetary atmospheres in maximum greenhouse conditions demonstrates the possibility of tracking the snowball transition at the outer edge of the HZ for a variety of planetary parameters, paving the road for multi-parametric studies of the HZ., Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, 10 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar wind, radiation, and interplanetary dust. Many scientific instruments onboard the two spacecraft will be completely, or partially devoted to study the near-space environment of Mercury as well as the complex processes that govern it. Many issues remain unsolved even after the MESSENGER mission that ended in 2015. The specific orbits of the two spacecraft, MPO and Mio, and the comprehensive scientific payload allow a wider range of scientific questions to be addressed than those that could be achieved by the individual instruments acting alone, or by previous missions. These joint observations are of key importance because many phenomena in Mercury's environment are highly temporally and spatially variable. Examples of possible coordinated observations are described in this article, analysing the required geometrical conditions, pointing, resolutions and operation timing of different BepiColombo instruments sensors., Comment: 78 pages, 14 figures, published

In this work we aim to characterise the dust motion in the inner coma of comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko to provide constraints for theoretical 3D coma models. The OSIRIS camera onboard the Rosetta mission was able for the first time to acquire images of single dust particles from inside the cometary coma, very close to the nucleus. We analyse a large number of particles, performing a significant statistic of their behaviour during the post perihelion period, when the spacecraft covered distances from the nucleus ranging between 80 and 400 km. We describe the particle trajectories, investigating their orientation and finding highly radial motion with respect to the nucleus. Then, from the particle brightness profiles, we derive a particle rotational frequency of v < 3.6 Hz, revealing that they are slow rotators and do not undergo fragmentation. We use scattering models to compare the observed spectral radiance of the particles with the simulated ones in order to estimate their size, finding values that range from millimetres up to centimetres. The statistics performed in this paper provide useful parameters to constrain the cometary coma dynamical models.

The Europlanet-2020 programme, which ended on Aug 31st, 2019, included an activity called VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access), which focused on adapting Virtual Observatory (VO) techniques to handle Planetary Science data. This paper describes some aspects of VESPA at the end of this 4-years development phase and at the onset of the newly selected Europlanet-2024 programme starting in 2020. The main objectives of VESPA are to facilitate searches both in big archives and in small databases, to enable data analysis by providing simple data access and online visualization functions, and to allow research teams to publish derived data in an interoperable environment as easily as possible. VESPA encompasses a wide scope, including surfaces, atmospheres, magnetospheres and planetary plasmas, small bodies, helio-physics, exoplanets, and spectroscopy in solid phase. This system relies in particular on standards and tools developed for the Astronomy VO (IVOA) and extends them where required to handle specificities of Solar System studies. It also aims at making the VO compatible with tools and protocols developed in different contexts, for instance GIS for planetary surfaces, or time series tools for plasma-related measurements. An essential part of the activity is to publish a significant amount of high-quality data in this system, with a focus on derived products resulting from data analysis or simulations., Comment: Submitted to Data Science Journal

On 27 Apr 2015, when 67P/C-G was at 1.76 au from the Sun and moving towards perihelion, the OSIRIS and VIRTIS-M instruments on Rosetta observed the evolving dust and gas coma during a complete rotation of the comet. We aim to characterize the dust, H2O and CO2 gas spatial distribution in the inner coma. To do this we performed a quantitative analysis of the release of dust and gas and compared the observed H2O production rate with the one calculated using a thermo-physical model. For this study we selected OSIRIS WAC images at 612 nm (dust) and VIRTIS-M image cubes at 612 nm, 2700 nm (H2O) and 4200 nm (CO2). We measured the average signal in a circular annulus, to study spatial variation around the comet, and in a sector of the annulus, to study temporal variation in the sunward direction with comet rotation, both at a fixed distance of 3.1 km from the comet centre. The spatial correlation between dust and water, both coming from the sun-lit side of the comet, shows that water is the main driver of dust activity in this time period. The spatial distribution of CO2 is not correlated with water and dust. There is no strong temporal correlation between the dust brightness and water production rate as the comet rotates. The dust brightness shows a peak at 0deg sub-solar longitude, which is not pronounced in the water production. At the same epoch, there is also a maximum in CO2 production. An excess of measured water production, with respect to the value calculated using a simple thermo-physical model, is observed when the head lobe and regions of the Southern hemisphere with strong seasonal variations are illuminated. A drastic decrease in dust production, when the water production (both measured and from the model) displays a maximum, happens when typical Northern consolidated regions are illuminated and the Southern hemisphere regions with strong seasonal variations are instead in shadow., Comment: 15 pages, accepted for publication in A&A

Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust, supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's atmosphere. The Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was equipped with a multitude of instruments designed to study cometary dust. While an abundant amount of data was presented in several individual papers, many focused on a dedicated measurement or topic. Different instruments, methods, and data sources provide different measurement parameters and potentially introduce different biases. This can be an advantage if the complementary aspect of such a complex data set can be exploited. However, it also poses a challenge in the comparison of results in the first place. The aim of this work therefore is to summarise dust results from Rosetta and before. We establish a simple classification as a common framework for inter-comparison. This classification is based on a dust particle's structure, porosity, and strength as well as its size. Depending on the instrumentation, these are not direct measurement parameters but we chose them as they were the most reliable to derive our model. The proposed classification already proved helpful in the Rosetta dust community and we propose to take it into consideration also beyond. In this manner we hope to better identify synergies between different instruments and methods in the future., Comment: accepted by A&A

On 3 July 2016, several instruments on board ESA's Rosetta spacecraft detected signs of an outburst event on comet 67P, at a heliocentric distance of 3.32 AU from the sun, outbound from perihelion. We here report on the inferred properties of the ejected dust and the surface change at the site of the outburst. The activity coincided with the local sunrise and continued over a time interval of 14 - 68 minutes. It left a 10m-sized icy patch on the surface. The ejected material comprised refractory grains of several hundred microns in size, and sub-micron-sized water ice grains. The high dust mass production rate is incompatible with the free sublimation of crystalline water ice under solar illumination as the only acceleration process. Additional energy stored near the surface must have increased the gas density. We suggest a pressurized sub-surface gas reservoir, or the crystallization of amorphous water ice as possible causes., Comment: 20 pages, 19 figures, 5 tables