Good MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) for January 2026:
Volume 545, #1
Trigo-Rodríguez, J. M. Grèbol-Tomàs, P. Ibáñez-Insa, J. et al. Assessing the metal and rare earth element mining potential of undifferentiated asteroids through the study of carbonaceous cho… staf1902
Frincke, T. T. Yaginuma, A. Noonan, J. W. et al. Near-discovery SOAR photometry of the third interstellar object: 3I/ATLAS staf1994
Volume 545, #2
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Volume 545, #3
Ai, G. Cui, L. Adaptive mascon modelling for small body gravity field reconstruction staf2198
Peng , L. Liang, Y. From asteroid flybys to galaxy encounters: hyperbolic restricted three-body problem with extreme mass ratios staf2105
Senel, C. B. Luther, R. Karatekin, Ö. et al. Proximal boulders and momentum transfer from DART-scale 3D impact simulations on asteroid Dimorphos staf2162
Bhat, U. Avdellidou, C. Delbo, M. et al. Searching for primitive, dark, spectrally red asteroid families in the main belt with Gaia staf2067
Frincke et al. I had already covered as a preprint. Now, the paper is- officially- reviewed and out.
Trigo-Rodríguez et al., now that’s interesting news. They cover asteroid mining, in depth. While metal asteroids may seem like natural targets, carbonaceous chondrites are more common and may be easier (including EROs, Easily Retrievable Objects). But first, we must grasp what the objects are. The authors use meteorites as stand-ins, plus to an extent the Hayabusa2/OSIRIS-REx samples.
For better and for worse, asteroids have low gravity. Really low gravity. While landing is trivial (barely landing at all- more like docking), such bodies don’t pull themselves into spheres, and are “potatos”. And irregular shapes give irregular gravity fields. Ai et al. do the math on irregularities.
And speaking of gravity, the dynamics of flybys apply across fields. Running over many orders of magnitude, an asteroid flyby of a planet and a galactic flyby of another galaxy share the same math.
From flybys, to “fly-outs”. Senel et al. consider the DART impact at Dimorphos. We have one (and a half? Deep Impact?) sample of a planetary-defense experiment in kinetic deflection, and we intend to get all the data out of it as we can. Until Hera arrives in ~10 mo., math will have to do.
And finally, we have to find the asteroids before we can do anything else (constructive or destructive). The Gaia mission did this well, with a ~1 meter telescope and a 24/7/365 duty cycle. Bhat et al. take the Gaia dataset (so far…) and try to glean dynamics (parents and child-asteroids) from it.