Fugitives from the Hungaria region: close encounters and impacts with terrestrial planets

TL;DR

This study investigates the long-term orbital evolution of Hungaria asteroids and their potential to cause close encounters and impacts with terrestrial planets, highlighting their role as a source of Near-Earth Asteroids.

Contribution

It provides a detailed dynamical analysis of Hungaria asteroids' trajectories over 100 million years, including impact velocities and encounter statistics with terrestrial planets.

Findings

Some Hungarias achieve high inclinations and eccentricities.

Impacts with Earth, Venus, and Mars are possible at high velocities.

Close encounters are statistically characterized.

Abstract

Hungaria asteroids, whose orbits occupy the region in element space between $1.78< a< 2.03$ AU, $e<0.19$, $12^\circ<i<31^\circ$, are a possible source of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs). Named after (434) Hungaria these asteroids are relatively small, since the largest member of the group has a diameter of just about 11 km. They are mainly perturbed by Jupiter and Mars, possibly becoming Mars-crossers and, later, they may even cross the orbits of Earth and Venus. In this paper we analyze the close encounters and possible impacts of escaped Hungarias with the terrestrial planets. Out of about 8000 known Hungarias we selected 200 objects which are on the edge of the group. We integrated their orbits over 100 million years in a simplified model of the planetary system (Mars to Saturn) subject only to gravitational forces. We picked out a sample of 11 objects (each with 50 clones) with large variations in semi-major axis and restarted the numerical integration in a gravitational model including the planets from Venus to Saturn. Due to close encounters, some of them achieve high inclinations and eccentricities which, in turn, lead to relatively high velocity impacts on Venus, Earth, and Mars. We statistically analyze all close encounters and impacts with the terrestrial planets and determine the encounter and impact velocities of these fictitious Hungarias.