60th Annual Meteoritical Society Meeting 5049.pdf
Can CO/CV meteorites come from the Eos family?
Eos asteroid family is one of the largest groupings in the main b elt [1] and
currently its memb ership consists of more than 480 ob jects [2]. The family is
cut by the 9:4 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter, and 5 resonant asteroids
have b een found within this resonance [3]. The family memb ers b elong to
the rare K taxonomic class and show a sp ectral app earance in b etween C-
and S-typ e asteroids [4,5].
Many authors suggest, on the basis of sp ectra and alb edo similarities,
that K-typ e asteroids mayhave a mineralogical comp osition close to that of
the anhydrous CO/CV carb onaceous chondrites [6,7,8]; however, the sp ec-
trum of 221 Eos do es not show clear evidence for the calcium-aluminium-rich
inclusions CAI absorption features typical of CO meteorites [9].
In order to test the link b etween CO/CV meteorites and K-typ e aster-
oids, in the context of the broader GAPTEC pro ject [10], wehave b egan a
massive and long-term numerical integration of a sample of synthetic ob jects
aimed at simulating real family memb ers injected into the 9:4 mean-motion
resonance. In this analysis, we use the SWIFT RMVS3 integrator package
[11,12].
The chaotic region asso ciated with the 9:4 mean-motion resonance spans
at least the region b etween 3.026 AU and 3.032 AUatlow eccentricityi.e.
< 0.06 and mo derately low inclination 10 values, corresp onding to
the lo cation of the Eos family.At presentwehave followed the dynamical
evolution of all particles for 120 Myr forwards, one of them 78 for
139 Myr.
Required eccentricity for an ob ject inside this resonance to b ecome a
Mars crosser is 0.45, whereas values as large as 0.70 allow it to b ecome
a Jupiter crosser. This di erence, together with the fact that the rate of
increase of eccentricity due to resonant e ects is very small, allows Mars to
extract the vast ma jority of particles from the resonance as so on as they
b ecome Mars crossers, therefore losing the protection mechanism with re-
sp ect to Jupiter encounters. At that stage most of the particles will b ecome
Jupiter controlled, and will b e very probably ejected from the Solar System.
Since the eccentricity required to b ecome an Earth crosser is 0.65, the
ob jects can, in principle, exp erience Earth encounters b efore they havea
chance to approach Jupiter. As a consequence, some ob jects can b ecome
Earth controlled and can show a secular decrease in semi-ma jor axis. As a
preliminary result, one of the simulated ob jects was found to follow a line
of constant Tisserand parameter with resp ect to the Earth and for a short
time to Venus, eventually colliding with our planet after 139.4 Myr. 1
60th Annual Meteoritical Society Meeting 5049.pdf
Our simulation gives strong constraints for what concerns the orbital
elements and the collisional history of CO/CV meteorites. Since only ab out
1 of the particles shows an evolved orbit semi-ma jor axis <2AU in
a timescale to o long for accounting meteoritic material coming directly
from the resonance, as consequence, the semi-ma jor axis and eccentricity
of CO/CV meteorites fallen on the Earth should b e of the order of 3 AU
and 0:65, resp ectively . Considering that the time required to achievean
Earth-crossing orbit is at least 50 Myr and the fact that the collisional life-
p
time in Myr of a meteoroid is prop ortional to r where r is the radius in
cm [12], therefore resulting in 10Myr for a b o dy metre-sized, meteorites
coming out from 9:4 resonance must have su ered a collisional-cascade pro-
cess.
In spite of the fact that 92 of the test particles that have b een \depleted"
[10] were found to b e ejected from the Solar System, the huge amountof
material provided by the catastrophic impact that pro duced the Eos family,
whose clue is the IRAS dust band asso ciated with the family, can yield for
the 2 of CO/CV meteorite falls on the Earth.
References: [1] Hirayama K. 1918 Astron. J., 31, 185-188. [2] Zappal a
V. et al. 1995 Icarus, 116, 291-314. [3] Morbidelli A. et al. 1995 Icarus,
118, 132-154. [4] Tedesco E.F. et al. 1989 Astron. J., 97, 580-606. [5]
Granahan J.C. et al. 1993 LPS, XXIV, 557. [6] Britt et al. 1992 Icarus,
99, 153-166. [7] Granahan J.C., 1993 PhD Thesis. [8] Doressoundiram A.
et al. 1997 Icarus, submitted. [9] Cloutis E.A. and Ga ey M.J. 1993
Icarus, 105, 568-579. [10] Gladman B.J. et al. 1997 Science, submitted.
[11] Wisdom J. and Holman M. 1991 Astron. J., 102, 1528-1538. [12]
Levison H.F. and Duncan M. 1994 Icarus, 108, 18-36. [13] Wetherill G.W.
1988 Icarus, 76, 1-18. 2