Astrometry of single-apparition asteroids possibly residing in the 2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter

Observation proposal

We propose to observe astrometrically single-apparition asteroids possibly residing in the 2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter aiming at the improvement of their orbit precision by the end of 2005. See the list of the relevant asteroids.

How to report observations?

The observations should be reported in a usual way - submit them to the Minor Planet Center, which later recalculates the orbits and we select the new orbital data from their databases.

Motivation

We study the asteroids located in the 2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter. Because the past (or future) orbital evolution of the resonant asteroids depends strongly on their current position with respect to the borders of the resonance, our analysis can rely only on numbered or, at least, multi-opposition asteroids, which have orbits determined precisely enough.

On the other hand, we need to know as many resonant asteroids as possible. E.g. a very important constraint on the past evolution of the resonant population is its size-distribution, but this can be precisely constructed only for a population of several hundred bodies which is not much affected by observational incompleteness. Thus we would appreciate follow-up observations or recoveries of single-apparition asteroids, which seem to be located in the 2:1 resonance, and decrease the observational incompleteness of the resonant population.

Our recent works on unstable resonant population are:

Broz M., Vokrouhlicky D., Roig F., Nesvorny D., Bottke W.F., Morbidelli A., 2004, The population of asteroids in the 2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter revised, in: Dynamics of Populations of Planetary Systems, eds. Z. Knezevic and A. Milani, The Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, in press. [download PDF]
Broz M., Vokrouhlicky D., Roig F., Nesvorny D., Bottke W.F., Morbidelli A., 2004, Yarkovsky origin of the unstable asteroids in the 2/1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter, MNRAS, submitted.

Next year, we are going to analyze asteroids residing on stable orbits in the 2:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter. These asteroids might be remnants of the primordial population and we can probably infer some properties of the protoplanetary disc at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment epoch. They can be one of crucial points in our understanding of the early evolution of the Solar System.

Contact

In case of any questions or comments, you can contact Miroslav Broz or David Vokrouhlicky by e-mail: mira@sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz or vokrouhl@mbox.cesnet.cz. This proposal can be found on our web-site http://sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz/yarko-site/.

List of asteroids

The list of 334 asteroids in astorb format (selected from astorb.dat vers. Nov 2004).

You can also obtain MPC ephemeris directly using these four HTML pages: [ 1-100 | 101-200 | 201-300 | 301-335 ]

Miroslav Broz (miroslav.broz@email.cz), Nov 9th 2004