New members of Datura family

TL;DR

This paper identifies and confirms three new members of the Datura asteroid family through orbital analysis, highlighting the dynamic and chaotic nature of one member due to resonance effects.

Contribution

It reports the discovery and orbital confirmation of three new members of the Datura asteroid family using numerical integration over 800,000 years.

Findings

Two members have stable orbits consistent with the family.

One member exhibits a chaotic orbit likely due to resonance.

The study enhances understanding of asteroid family dynamics.

Abstract

Asteroid families are groups of minor planets which have a common origin in catastrophic disruptions. Young asteroid families are very interesting because they represent the product of their parent body's fragmentation before orbital and physical evolutionary processes could have changed them. A group of minor asteroids associated with the largest body Datura(1270) is of particular interest because it has enough known members and resides in the inner part of the main asteroid belt and is easy to observe. Up to now, 7 members of this family are known. Here we discuss three new members of the Datura Family: 338309(2002 VR17), 2002 RH291 and 2014 OE206. To prove that these recently-discovered members belong to the Datura family, we conducted numeric integration with all gravitational perturbation over the last 800 kyrs. In the results, we have found that 338309(2002 VR17) and 2002 RH291 are very close to the mean orbit of this family throughout the calculation. In the case of 2014 OE206, it has a strongly chaotic orbit. The possible explanation of this is in the resonance character of its orbit.