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Showing posts with label (63440) 2001 MD30. Show all posts
Showing posts with label (63440) 2001 MD30. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Question about divorced asteroid pairs orbit stability

I refer to the list of most recently potentially divorced binary pairs found by Robert D, Matson.

I used JPL Horizons Web Interface to get the orbital data for (63440) 2001 MD30 and (331933) 2004 TV14

Then, I used the Mercury simulator to look at their past and future orbits and I used the R package to plot the results:

Let's look at the past:

Let's now look at the future:

I do not know if it is common for two divorced asteroid pairs to continue to stay on a very similar orbit. At least in this case, these asteroids will come again very very near. 

Not clear if this is a proof of the fact that they are a divorced pair or this is just a nice example of two asteroids that have nothing to do but are by chance on a (almost) collision orbit.

The nominal result for the event "minimum distance" is:
  • date: 25-May-5418
  • minimum distance : 8.95e-06 (AU) ... just about 1300 km
  • relative velocity:       2.16e-07 ( AU/day ) ... just about 0.37 m/s

uncertainty error : unknown


Kind Regards,
Alessandro Odasso