Quite the Icarus for August (vol. 436):
Barrett, T. J. Bryson, J. F. J. Geraki, K. The source of hydrogen in earth’s building blocks Art. 116588 .2025.116588
Li, Y. Liu, J. Ning, X. et al. Dimension-ratio-based observability analysis of asteroid photometric model and optimization strategy for completely observable satellite de… Art. 116583 .2025.116583
Colazo, M. Oszkiewicz, D. Alvarez-Candal, A. et al. Asteroid phase curves and phase coloring effect using the ATLAS survey data Art. 116577 .2025.116577
Scheeres, D. J. An energy-angular momentum phase function for rubble pile asteroids Art. 116563 .2025.116563
Earth’s oceans: from whence they came? Barrett et al. add their weight to a growing number of scientists and papers. Per all them, much (if not most) of Earth’s water had been here all along: Earth’s rock never really dried out in the planet’s formation, and had stored their “water” (in multiple forms including trapped hydrogen) all the while. The need for comet strikes as a plot device is not needed at all. Not needed- when will the “Comets watered the Earth” trope die?
The next two papers are variations on a theme: the study of small bodies as astronomical objects (i. e., points of light in the sky). Li et al. and Colazo et al. try to pull maximum information out of that point, because for the majority of asteroids, that’s all we’ll see in the foreseeable future. Even for asteroids targeted by probe missions, the target would be characterized as thoroughly as we can before finalizing mission parameters- can’t waste many millions on a surprising body.
As for Scheeres 2025, let’s look at the dynamics of a non-point. When bodies collide, there are multiple outcomes, from a simple crater to total disruption. In between, we have multiple states: formation of a rubble pile, and formation of a binary (itself including formation of an orbiting satellite, and the collapse of that satellite back to the primary- a contact binary). Using energy equations as basic physics, Scheeres tries to step through the pathway, to one outcome, and not the rest. In other words, can we unravel the history of binaries (contact or not)?