Dynamical Investigation of Asteroid 66391 (1999 KW4)

Details Dynamical Investigation of Asteroid 66391 (1999 KW4) Dynamical Investigation of Asteroid 66391 (1999 KW4)

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.6503s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #65.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.614

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Radar imaging and simulation of the binary near-Earth asteroid 66391 (1999 KW4) reveals a system with highly unusual physical and dynamical properties (Ostro et al., DPS 2006). Classical treatments and previous analyses of binary-system dynamics have made assumptions about the component shapes that are not valid for the KW4 system. We have explored the full dynamics of the KW4 system via numerical simulations that solve the equations of motion for the coupled evolution of orbit and rotation, using radar-derived physical models, and using dynamical constraints from the observations to guide our initial conditions. Our simulations model the translational (or orbital) dynamics as the relative motion between the body centers of mass and model the rotational dynamics using the Euler equations and attitude kinematic equations for each body. All the equations are driven by the mutual gravitational potential, which is an explicit function of the relative position and attitude of the two bodies. Propagation of the system's dynamical evolution over time spans of months has been made tractable by using a novel variational integrator that requires only one evaluation per time step but conserves the symplectic properties of the dynamical system, and by implementing the evaluations on a parallel computer, using up to 256 processors. Our simulations use the component shapes, masses, and average orbit as initial conditions for integrations of the components' spins and mutual orbit, taking into consideration the actual gravitational potentials produced by the model shapes and the coupling between the components' motions. Our results reveal this NEA to have extraordinary physical and dynamical properties, which suggest intriguing possibilities for formation and evolution mechanisms.

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