Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My

Details Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.5305v&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #53.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.582

Physics

Scientific paper

Here we report the discovery of four new and very recent asteroid breakups in the main belt, all which occurred within the last My. To identify these asteroid mini-families, we looked for similarities in their osculating orbital elements (except mean anomaly). We selected 264,403 asteroids from the Lowell Observatory catalog that have observational arcs longer than 10 days, and we used the hierarchical clustering method (HCM) to search for groups. Backward integration of the clustered orbits allowed us to determine the age of each breakup event. The youngest of the 4 was 70 kya, while the oldest was 600 kya. These new asteroid mini-families are important because they have not yet experienced significant orbital evolution from Yarkovsky thermal forces nor meaningful spectroscopic changes from space weathering processes. Accordingly, they provide us with natural laboratories to better understand impact physics, asteroid composition, and surface-aging processes. Moreover, dust produced by these events may be a source of some of the material in the circumstellar (zodiacal) dust cloud as well as specific infrared features observed with the IRAS and Spitzer spacecrafts. The timescales for small dust particles produced by these breakup events to reach Earth by Poynting-Roberson drag is short enough that some should have already landed on Earth; this raises the possibility of identifying it within well-dated ice core samples. Thus, finding this material could be considered one way to have a very low-cost asteroid sample return mission.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Discovery Of Main-belt Asteroid Breakups Occurring Within The Last 1 My will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1001209