9:00 AM - 9:30 AM
[PPS03-13] History of the inner main asteroid belt - searching for origins of space mission targets and the oldest families
★Invited Papers
Keywords:Asteroids, Space Missions
Near-Earth asteroids (NEA), by their very nature, are simply passing
through the neighborhood of the terrestrial planets. They typically
originate in the Main Asteroid Belt and their final destinations are
usually impacts with the Sun or planets. Due to the chaotic nature of
their orbits it is impossible to exactly trace their history or
predict their future. Hence, to find additional context about any
specific NEA necessarily relies on probabilistic arguments about their
orbital history and spectral comparisons to families of asteroids
throughout the Main Belt.
Most NEAs on mission accessible orbits (low Delta-V) are thought to
have escaped the Main Asteroid Belt via the nu6 secular resonance,
which would demand an inner Main Asteroid Belt origin (between the nu6
at 2.1au and the 3:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter at
2.5au). Within the inner Main Belt (IMB), there are a handful of
asteroid families, which, if an NEA could be positively linked as a
family member, could provide a significant amount of context for its
properties and longer-term evolution in the Main Belt. We will discuss
the continued search for, discovery of, and characterization of the
families in this region of the Asteroid Belt and what it tells us
about the NEAs scheduled to be visited by spacecraft.
through the neighborhood of the terrestrial planets. They typically
originate in the Main Asteroid Belt and their final destinations are
usually impacts with the Sun or planets. Due to the chaotic nature of
their orbits it is impossible to exactly trace their history or
predict their future. Hence, to find additional context about any
specific NEA necessarily relies on probabilistic arguments about their
orbital history and spectral comparisons to families of asteroids
throughout the Main Belt.
Most NEAs on mission accessible orbits (low Delta-V) are thought to
have escaped the Main Asteroid Belt via the nu6 secular resonance,
which would demand an inner Main Asteroid Belt origin (between the nu6
at 2.1au and the 3:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter at
2.5au). Within the inner Main Belt (IMB), there are a handful of
asteroid families, which, if an NEA could be positively linked as a
family member, could provide a significant amount of context for its
properties and longer-term evolution in the Main Belt. We will discuss
the continued search for, discovery of, and characterization of the
families in this region of the Asteroid Belt and what it tells us
about the NEAs scheduled to be visited by spacecraft.