LINK<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n“Asteroid discoveries are essential for planetary-defense efforts aiming to prevent impacts with Earth, including the more frequent megaton explosions from decameter impactors. While large asteroids (\u2265100\u2009km) have remained in the main belt since their formation, small asteroids are commonly transported to the near-Earth object (NEO) population. However, due to the lack of direct observational constraints, their size-frequency distribution \u2014which informs our understanding of the NEOs and the delivery of meteorite samples to Earth\u2014varies significantly among models. Here, we report 138 detections of the smallest asteroids (\u2a86 10\u2009m) ever observed in the main belt, which were enabled by JWST\u2019s infrared capabilities covering the asteroids\u2019 emission peaks and synthetic tracking techniques. Despite small orbital arcs, we constrain the objects\u2019 distances and phase angles using known asteroids as proxies, allowing us to derive sizes via radiometric techniques. Their size-frequency distribution exhibits a break at ~ 100\u2009m (debiased cumulative slopes of q = \u2212 2.66 \u00b1 0.60 and \u2212 0.97 \u00b1 0.14 for diameters smaller and larger than ~ 100\u2009m, respectively), suggestive of a population driven by collisional cascade. These asteroids were sampled from multiple asteroid families \u2014most likely Nysa, Polana and Massalia\u2014 according to the geometry of pointings considered here. Through additional long-stare infrared observations, JWST is poised to serendipitously detect thousands of decameter-scale asteroids across the sky, probing individual asteroid families and the source regions of meteorites \u201cin-situ\u201d.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Artem Y. Burdanov, Julien de Wit, Miroslav Bro\u017e, Thomas G. M\u00fcller, Tobias Hoffmann, Marin Ferrais, Marco Micheli, Emmanuel Jehin, Daniel Parrott, Samantha N. Hasler, Richard P. Binzel, Elsa Ducrot, Laura Kreidberg, Micha\u00ebl Gillon, Thomas P….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,8,127],"tags":[3433,1854,1403,3873,6629,4605],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36973,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36972\/revisions\/36973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}