Harrison Agrusa

I am an astrophysicist and planetary scientist broadly interested in solar system dynamics and scientific computing. I recently received my Ph.D. from the University of Maryland where most of my research has focused on the dynamics of the binary asteroid Didymos in support of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission. You can download my CV here (last updated: April 2023).

You can find my Google Scholar profile here and a listing of my publications on NASA ADS here.

Contact

Email: hagrusa@oca.eu
Twitter: @harrisonagrusa

Gallery

Here is a (seldomly updated) list of old movies from numerical simulations.

Here’s a movie where we simulate the dynamical evolution of the Didymos system following a DART-like impact. This animation shows the secondary component (Dimorphos) librating following the impact. Then, some time later, you can see Dimorphos become attitude unstable. The attitude stability properties are highly dependent on its shape and the magnitude of the perturbation provided by DART. We studied Dimorphos’ post-impact attitude stability in-depth in this paper if you want to learn more!

Here is a similar simulation, this time in a rotating frame:

Here’s an old gif where we simulated the Didymos system using pkdgrav, a parallel n-body code: