Small Bodies Science

Small bodies are especially important in planetary science for two reasons. First, most small bodies have escaped wholesale melting or other severe forms of thermal processing and thus preserve chemical compositions closer to the initial ones. [In fact, many small bodies (e.g. the comets) formed and remained so cold over cosmic time that they retain the volatile ices from which they formed]. Second, the small bodies are very numerous compared to the major planets. They make excellent dynamical tracers and allow detailed models of the origin and evolution of the solar system to be tested.

The principal reservoirs of the small bodies are the asteroids (main-belt and near-Earth), the comets, the Centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects and the comets of the Oort Cloud. All are subjects of active research at UCLA.

Research Areas

On-going research on the asteroids includes both spacecraft (e.g. DAWN, Hubble) and ground-based astronomical work. Included in the latter are sophisticated radar observations to probe the nature and binarity of near-Earth asteroids, and optical imaging and spectroscopic observations designed to map activity in a strange new class of main-belt objects. UCLA researchers investigate the comets directly and in their precusor state in the Kuiper Belt nursery beyond Neptune.

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People

Michal Drahus  |  Aurelie Guilbert  |  David Jewitt  |  Jean-Luc Margot  |  William Newman  |  Carolyn Nugent  |  Sebastiano Padovan  |  Chris Russell  |  Rachel Stevenson

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Version 2010 Feb 21