Remnants of Parent Body Spin State Among Koronis Family Spin-Vectors

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

An ongoing observational survey of members of the Koronis asteroid family continues to yield new lightcurves, and we have analyzed all available published and unpublished lightcurves obtained through spring 2001 to deduce senses of rotation and spin-vector orientations for most of the largest members of the family. Spin-vector determinations are now available for a total of ten members of the Koronis family, including (243) Ida, whose ground-based pole solution was confirmed by observations from the Galileo spacecraft. The distribution of the north pole obliquities of family members is markedly bimodal, clustered near about 160 degrees and 50 degrees. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test confirms that the anisotropy is statistically significant at greater than the 98% confidence level. We find that information about the spin-states of two different parent bodies is present among the largest members of the Koronis family: a low-obliquity retrograde rotator with a period of about 14 hours, and an intermediate-obliquity prograde rotator with a period of about 8.5 hours. These spin-vector results represent the first physical evidence based on rotational angular momentum that corroborates the widely-accepted hypothesis that the Koronis family was formed by fragmentation, and they have interesting implications for the origin, age, and collisional evolution of this family.

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