Towards understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroid 25143 Itokawa: constraints from sample analysis

Authors

Harold Connolly Jr., Rowan UniversityFollow
Dante S. LaurettaFollow
Kevin J. Walsh
Shogo Tachibana
William F. Bottke Jr.

Document Type

Article

Version Deposited

Published Version

Publication Date

1-27-2015

Publication Title

Earth, Planets and Space

DOI

10.1186/s40623-015-0185-3

Abstract

The data from the analysis of samples returned by Hayabusa from asteroid 25143 Itokawa are used to constrain the preaccretion history, the geological activity that occurred after accretion, and the dynamical history of the asteroid from the main belt to near-Earth space. We synthesize existing data to pose hypotheses to be tested by dynamical modeling and the analyses of future samples returned by Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx. Specifically, we argue that the Yarkosky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect may be responsible for producing geologically high-energy environments on Itokawa and other asteroids that process regolith and essentially affect regolith gardening.

Comments

Earth, Planets and Space is a SpringerOpen journal.

This article copyright Connolly et al.; licensee Springer.

Recommended Citation

Connolly, H.C., Lauretta, D.S., Walsh, K.J., Tachibana, S. & Bottke, W.F. (2015). Towards understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroid 25143 Itokawa: contraints from sample analysis. Earth, Planets and Space 67:12.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.