The orbit of the asteroid (2953) Vyshleslavia is presently locked in a tiny chaotic zone very close to the 5:2 mean motion jovian resonance. Its dynamical lifetime is estimated to be of the order of only 10 Myr. Since Vyshleslavia is a member of the Koronis family (about 1 Gyr old), such a short lifetime opens a variety of interesting questions concerning its origin and evolution.
Vysheslavia might be placed onto its peculiar orbit by secondary disruption in the family. However, Farinella and Milani had estimated that there is less than 5% probability of such event during the last ~100 Myr. On the contrary, we propose that Vyshleslavia might have been placed on its orbit by a slow inward-drift of the semimajor axis due to the Yarkovsky effect. The strength of this thermal force depends sensitively on the orientation of the spin axis, the rotation period and the shape of the body. Unfortunately, we do not have any explicit information about these parameters for Vyshleslavia.
We will thus appreciate photometric observations of (2953) Vysheslavia. Ideally, we might wish to determine the orientation of Vysheslavia's spin axis (which would be conclusive about its past history), but obtaining the rotation period might also be important. The asteroid will be best observable during April 2001, when its visual magnitude should be between 15.1 and 15.5.
More information about our reseach and numerical simulations could be found at http://sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz/~mira/mp/. See also: lightcurve from the previous year, obtained by Sarounova, et al. (2000), list of our publications concerning (2953) Vysheslavia and Koronis asteroid family.
Miroslav Broz (mira@sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz) and
David Vokrouhlicky (vokrouhl@mbox.cesnet.cz)
Institute of Astronomy, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic