Determination of asteroid masses from their close encounters with Mars

Abstract

An obstacle to the asteroid mass determination lies in the difficulty in isolating the gravitational perturbation exerted by a single asteroid on the planets, being strongly correlated and mixed up with those of many other asteroids. This hindrance may be avoided by the method of analysis presented here: an asteroid mass is estimated in correspondence with its close encounters with Mars where the acceleration it induces on the planet can be sufficiently disentangled from those generated by the remaining asteroid masses to calculate. We test this technique in the analysis of range observations to Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express performed from 1999 to 2007. For this purpose, we adopt the dynamical model of the planetary ephemeris INPOP06 (Fienga et al., 2008), which includes the gravitational influences of the 300 most perturbing asteroids of the Martian orbit. We obtain the solutions of 10 asteroid masses that have the largest effects on this orbit over the period examined: they are generally in good agreement with determinations recently published.