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Asteroid Spins: From the Very Fast to the Very Slow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

A. W. Harris  and
W.Z. Wisniewski
A. W. Harris
Affiliation:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California, USA
W.Z. Wisniewski
Affiliation:
University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona, USA

Extract

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The application of CCD photometry to monitoring the light variations of very small asteroids has led to an explosion of data available, and perhaps as importantly, has made it possible to probe fainter, and hence smaller asteroids. In this paper, we review several new results from the analysis of such lightcurve data, much of it taken by the late W. Z. Wisniewski, a native of Poland who studied at Poznan University (Wisniewski et al., 1997).

At the time of the last close pass of the asteroid 4179 Toutatis by the Earth in 1992, it became apparent from radar observations that the asteroid was in a bizarre rotation state, and that the rotation rate was extremely slow. Harris (1994), re-evaluating the work by Burns and Safronov (1973) found that very small and slowly rotating asteroids can have a time scale of damping into a principal-axis rotation state which is long compared to their expected collisional lifetime, or for that matter, the age of the solar system:

Type
Rotation of Solar System Objects
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 165: Dynamics and Astrometry of Natural and Artificial Celestial Bodies , 1997 , pp. 265 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1997

References

Burns, J.A. and Safronov, V.S.: 1973, “Asteroid nutation angles”, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 165, 403–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, A.W.: 1994, “Tumbling asteroids”, Icarus 107, 209–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, A.W.: 1996, “The rotation rates of very small asteroids: Evidence for ‘rubble pile’ structure”, Lunar and Planetary Science XXVII, 493–494.Google Scholar
Mottola, S., plus 15 co-authors: 1995, “The slow rotation of 253 Mathilde”, Planet. Space Sci. 43, 1609–1613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wisniewski, W.Z., Micha lowski, T.M., Harris, A.W., and McMillan, R.S.: 1997, “Photometric observations of 125 asteroids”, Icarus , in press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar