Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
5487966 Planetary and Space Science 2017 6 Pages PDF
Abstract
Asteroid families are groups of minor planets which have a common origin in catastrophic disruptions. Young asteroid families are very interesting because they represent the product of their parent body's fragmentation before orbital and physical evolutionary processes could have changed them. A group of minor asteroids associated with the largest body (1270) Datura is of particular interest because it has enough known members and resides in the inner part of the main asteroid belt and is easier to observe than families (with similar physical characteristics on their surfaces) at further distances. Up to now, 7 members of this family are known. Here we discuss three new members of the Datura Family: (338309) 2002 VR17, 2002 RH291 and 2014 OE206. To prove that these recently-discovered members belong to the Datura family, we conducted numerical orbit integrations with all gravitational perturbation over the last 800 kyrs. In the results, we have found that (338309) 2002 VR17 and 2002 RH291 are very close to the mean orbit of this family throughout the calculation. In the case of 2014 OE206, it has a strongly chaotic orbit.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences Geophysics
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