Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Sep 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.1030g&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #10.30; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1102
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Recent analyses of radar and photometric observations of several asteroids including 4179 Toutatis (discussed in A.W.Harris, Icarus 107, 209-211, 1994) and 253 Mathilde (Mottola et al., Plan. Space Sci 43, 1609-1613, 1995) have highlighted the fact that non-principal-axis rotation (sometimes just called 'tumbling') is detectable and possibly even commonplace for small slowly rotating asteroids. We report results from catastrophic impact experiments carried out in 1989 and 1992, designed to simulate the disruptions in the asteroid belt. A small proportion of the fragments emerging from the disrupted targets have been observed rotating about non-principal axes, which is not in itself surprising but has never before been studied in impact experiments of this kind. We have been able to study several of these tumbling fragments in some detail alongside the simple rotators which appear to constitute the majority of ejected fragments. A key point regarding the reduction of data from these experiments is that not all tumbling fragments are visibly detectable as such: In order to estimate the true proportion of tumbling fragments we develop a simple theoretical model which assumes initially that all fragments are tumbling, then apply realistic selection effects in order to allow comparison to the laboratory results. We find that the experimentally observed proportion of fragments which are visibly tumbling - approximately 5% - is not consistent with an isotropic distribution of angles between the angular momentum vector of a given fragment and its principal axis.
Farinella Paolo
Giblin Ian
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