Discover

(Redirected from Pallas asteroid)
The 'Pallas' 'family' of asteroids is a grouping of B-type asteroids at very high inclinations in the intermediate main belt (Cellino et al (2002)).
The namesake is 2 Pallas, an extremely large asteroid with a mean diameter of about 530 km. The remaining bodies are far smaller (the largest being 5222 Ioffe with an estimated diameter of 22 km), which indicates that this is probably a so-called ''cratering'' family composed of ejecta from impacts onto the parent body 2 Pallas.

From the diagram, their proper orbital elements lie in the approximate ranges

	''ap''	ep''	''ip''
min	2.71 AU	0.25	32°
max	2.79 AU	0.31	34°

At the present epoch, the range of osculating orbital elements of the members (by comparison to the MPCORB database [1]) is about

	''a''	e''	''i''
min	2.71 AU	0.13	30°
max	2.79 AU	0.37	38°

The family appears to be genuinely derived from impacts onto Pallas due to the preponderance of the otherwise rare B spectral type among its members.
The grouping was first noted by Kiyotsugu Hirayama in 1928, and later by Brouwer (1951), Kozai (1979), and Lemaitre&Morbidelli (1994).

Contents

References

References

★ A. Lemaitre & A. Morbidelli, ''Proper elements for highly inclined asteroidal orbits'', Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, Vol. 60, pp. 29 (1994).

★ Y. Kozai ''[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1979IAUS...81..231K&db_key=AST&data_type=HTML&format=&high=43ee033a4808372 Secular perturbations of asteroids and comets'' In: Dynamics of the solar system; Proceedings of the Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, May 23-26, 1978. Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979, p. 231-236; Discussion, p. 236, 237.

★ A. Cellino et al "Spectroscopic Properties of Asteroid Families", in ''Asteroids III'', p. 633-643, University of Arizona Press (2002). (Table on page 636, in particular).

★ MPCORB orbit database