Study on the Spin Characteristics of the Flora Asteroid Family

Abstract

Asteroid families are the remnants of catastrophic collisions, and their fundamental physical properties provide us the information of their parent bodies and thereafter dynamical evolutions. Especially, the orbit and spin characteristics can reveal the influences of the Yarkovsky effect and the Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect on the evolution of the asteroid family, respectively. Based on the Asteroid Lightcurve Database (LCDB), the spin rate distribution of the Flora asteroid family is studied, and a tendency that the spin rates of the small Flora family members concentrate primarily in the range of 3–5 d−1 is found. The analysis on the spin states of the Flora family asteroids tells that most of these asteroid family members are in the prograde spinning state. However, for the Flora family members with an orbital semi-major axis smaller than 2.2au, the ratio between the number of prograde spinning members and that of retrograde ones is close to that of the near-Earth asteroids, namely 1:3. Furthermore, for those prograde spinning Flora family asteroids with an orbital semi-major axis larger than 2.2au, a portion of them exhibit the aggregation in the distribution of orbital semi-major axis against the absolute magnitude, and in which nine members show the features similar to the Slivan state.