Wow, good issue of Astronomical Journal for Sep (vol. 170 #3):
Peña-Asensio, E. Ferrari, F. Meteoroid Stream Identification with HDBSCAN Unsupervised Clustering Algorithm 140 adec8c
Jewitt, D. Li, J. Jaeger, M. et al. Down But Not Out: The Case of Long-period Comet C/2021 O3 (Panstarrs) 142 adea4d
Silber, E. A. Sawal, V. BLADE: An Automated Framework for Classifying Light Curves from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Fireball Database 153 adeb55
Ferreira, F. S. Camargo, J. I. B. Morgado, B. E. et al. Size and Shape of Jupiter Trojan (2207) Antenor from Stellar Occultations 160 adefdc
Nesvorný, D. Morbidelli, A. Bottke, W. F. et al. Terrestrial Planet Formation from Two Source Reservoirs 180 adf20a
Zhang, P. Luo, R. Chen, M. Detecting Asteroids in TESS Full-frame Images Using a
Gradient-based Iterative Algorithm 187 adea3c
Quickly, meteors are important as pieces of comets/asteroids; the largest meteoroids (“superbolides”) are themselves the smallest asteroids (~1 meter across). Yet, our telescopes are hopeless in the face of things this tiny. Meteor statistics are then our only means of deducing the population at this tail end of objects.
Comet C/2021 O3 made a close pass by the Sun- so close many assumed it would be destroyed. It wasn’t; studying the emissions (both gases, and dusts) of such heated objects can tell us of the fractions of a comet nucleus that we rarely see.
The Jupiter Trojans are objects of study, and not just because of Lucy. They are a transitional population, an edge case (maybe cases) of multiple pools from the early Solar System. Anything we can learn of Trojans- such as Ferreira et al.- gives us more context for Lucy results, and more puzzle pieces of that early Solar System.
…and speaking of pieces of the early Solar System, Earth (and Mars, etc.) accreted from meteorites. Using meteorite tracers, plus what we know of Earth, Mars, etc., Nesvorny et al. try to form a picture of the inner Solar System during that accretion.
Finally, the issue of asteroid search and identification continues; as the brighter, bigger ones get cataloged, we must chase down smaller, dimmer targets. Yet bigger, more sensitive telescopes bear a cost. “Synthetic tracking” (or, to the military, track-before-detect) is a processing method to pull faint objects out of image noise. But greater and greater gains by synthetic tracking take geometrically-growing compute power. Zhang et al. try algorithms to do asteroid search without supercomputers.