Near Earth Asteroids with measurable Yarkovsky effect

By D. Farnocchia, S. Chesley, David Vokrouhlický, Andrea Milani, Federica Spoto, William Bottke. 2012

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We seek evidence of the Yarkovsky effect among Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by measuring the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift from the orbital fit. To prevent the occurrence of unreliable detections we employ a high precision dynamical model, including the Newtonian attraction of 16 massive asteroids and the planetary relativistic terms, and a suitable astrometric data treatment. We find 21 NEAs whose orbital fits show a measurable orbital drift with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) greater than 3. The best determination is for asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, with an SNR ∼ 200. In some cases it is possible to constrain physical quantities otherwise unknown. Furthermore, the distribution of the detected orbital drifts shows an excess of retrograde rotators that can be connected to the delivery mechanism from the most important NEA feeding resonances and allows us to infer the obliquity distribution of NEAs. We discuss the implications of the Yarkovsky effect for impact predictions. In particular, for asteroid (29075) 1950 DA our results favor a retrograde rotation, which may have implications for the 2880 impact threat.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3886858bea5eb1660c69231bd3a2375c8d6cd22a

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Debiased orbit and absolute-magnitude distributions for near-Earth objects (2018, background): “A non-zero Yarkovsky drift in semimajor axis has been measured for tens of known NEOs (Chesley et al., 2003; Nugent et al., 2012; Farnocchia et al., 2013; Vokrouhlický et al., 2015), but the common assumption is that over the long term the Yarkovsky effect on NEO orbits is dwarfed by the strong orbi”
Orbit and bulk density of the OSIRIS-REx target Asteroid (101955) Bennu (2014, methodology): “The gravitational effects of the Sun, eight planets, the Moon and Pluto are based on JPL’s DE424 planetary ephemeris (Folkner 2011).”
In search of the source of asteroid (101955) Bennu: Applications of the stochastic YORP model (2015, background): “This leaves us with few direct constraints on the Yarkovsky drift rates of typical Bennu-sized bodies (e.g., Nugent et al., 2012; Farnocchia et al., 2013) and even less information on how they evolve in reaction to YORP (e.g., Vokrouhlický and Bottke, 2012).”