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Observations of the shape, topography, crustal thickness and surface composition of the South Pole–Aitken impact basin on the Moon suggest a southward impact trajectory and the excavation of a discontinuous remnant magma ocean from beneath the crust.

The Late Heavy Bombardment lasted much longer than previously thought, up to 1.7 billion years ago on Earth, with impacts on the Moon and Earth coming mostly from the E-belt-survivor Hungaria asteroids.

The impact flux from kilometre-sized bodies has increased by at least a factor of two over the long-term average during the last ∼100 Myr. This surge probably was triggered by the catastrophic disruption of the parent body of the asteroid Baptistina, which broke up in the inner main asteroid belt. Fragments evolved to orbits where they could strike the terrestrial planets.

The timing and number of large impact basins on early Mars are poorly constrained. Gravity and topographic analyses support a lull in basin-forming impacts following the main stage of accretion.

Observations from the Lucy spacecraft of the small main-belt asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh reveals unexpected complexity, with a longitudinal trough and equatorial ridge, as well as the discovery of the first contact binary satellite.

Two asteroids have been observed gradually spinning faster and faster, and the hot tip is that sunlight is the cause. If so, this could give us a handle on the dynamics and evolution of the asteroid belt in general.

Wherever we look in the Solar System, small bodies often seem to come in twos. Simulations show how asteroids spun in the Sun can produce such pairings — one of whose members acquires a strangely familiar shape.

The main asteroid belt contains a surprising diversity of objects, ranging from primitive ice-rock mixtures to igneous rocks. The standard model used to explain this assumes the violent dynamical evolution of the giant-planet orbits. Here, this evolution is shown to lead to the insertion of primitive trans-Neptunian objects into the outer belt, implying that the observed diversity of the asteroid belt is not a direct reflection of the intrinsic compositional variation of the proto-planetary disk, but rather of dynamical evolution.

By comparing asteroid detections and a near-Earth-object model the deficit of objects near the Sun is shown to arise from the breakup of most asteroids, especially low-albedo ones, at distances of a few tens of solar radii from the Sun.

Heck et al. provide the first experimental evidence that the composition of meteorites falling on the Earth changes with time. The distribution of meteorites 470 million years ago is significantly different from today — an effect linked to events happening in the asteroid belt.

The Patroclus–Menoetius Jupiter Trojan binary could survive its travel from the Kuiper belt to Jupiter’s orbit only if the giant planets’ migrations happened within ~100 Myr after the birth of the Solar System and not after ~700 Myr, as suggested instead by the Late Heavy Bombardment.