Candidate Main-belt Asteroids for Surface Heterogeneity

Abstract

Large terrestrial bodies in our solar system like the Earth, Mars, Mercury, and the Moon exhibit geologically complex surfaces with compositional heterogeneity. From past studies using large telescopes and spacecraft, it was shown that asteroids with diameters larger than 100 km also show surface heterogeneity at hemispheric scales, while on smaller objects, such features remain to be detected. Here, we investigate candidates for surface heterogeneity in a sample of 130 main-belt asteroids using multiepoch spectroscopic data from the MIT–Hawaii Near-Earth Object Spectroscopic Survey, which has been observing asteroids for about 20 yr using a self-consistent observation technique. Twelve conservative candidates with spectra more than 3σ apart from each other at 2.4 μm and 52 optimistic candidates for surface heterogeneity are detected. These candidates include eight objects already reported as being heterogeneous. Our study suggests that the size boundary between small homogeneous asteroids and larger heterogeneous objects, if it exists, is lower than 100 km. A-type asteroids have a higher proportion of heterogeneous candidates than other asteroids. This may be because olivine, which is the main surface constituent of these objects, reacts more efficiently to space weathering with respect to pyroxene, such that a similar range of surface ages will translate into a wider range of optical-to-near-infrared spectral slopes in the case of A-type bodies.