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Surface Thermal Inertia of Near-Earth Asteroid (469219) Kamo`oalewa: Statistical Estimation and Implications

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Abstract

The Chinese small body exploration mission Tianwen-2 is aimed at sampling the near-Earth, fast-rotating asteroid (469219) Kamo`oalewa and returning the samples to Earth. Characterisation of the currently unknown physical properties of Kamo`oalewa in the pre-mission phase would support mission implementation. In this study, we preliminarily estimate the surface thermal inertia of Kamo`oalewa using a statistical method, based on the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift of (–6.155 ± 1.758) × 10-3 au/Myr for Kamo`oalewa obtained in our previous work. A reasonable estimate of the surface thermal inertia obtained is \(402.05_{{ - 194.37}}^{{ + 376.29}}\) J K–1 m–2 s–1/2. This low value suggests the presence of coarse regolith on the surface of Kamo`oalewa or its nature as a porous rock. The regolith potentially present on the surface of Kamo`oalewa may have millimetre- to decimetre-sized grains with cohesive strengths varying from ~0.76 to ~0.045 Pa. If Kamo`oalewa is a porous rock, its porosity is expected to range from ~20 to 50%, corresponding to tensile strengths of ~1.3 to 11.5 MPa. This study provides preliminary insights into the surface thermal inertia of Kamo`oalewa from a statistical viewpoint, which may facilitate the Tianwen-2 mission.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The numerical calculations of this paper have been done in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42241116, 42030110) and National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2022YFF0503202). Jianguo Yan is supported by the 2022 Project of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China for Heaven Lake Talent Program and Macau University of Science and Technology (SKL-LPS(MUST)-2021-2023). It is also supported by Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and Geodesy, Ministry of Education, Wuhan University (21-01-01). JPB was funded by a DAR grant in planetology from the French Space Agency (CNES).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chongqing Satellite Network System Co., Ltd., 401135, Chongqing, China

    Lu Liu & Qiao Chen

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 430070, Wuhan, China

    Jianguo Yan, Mao Ye, Denggao Qiu & Jean-Pierre Barriot

  3. Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 830011, Urumqi, China

    Jianguo Yan

  4. State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Science, Macau University of Science and Technology, China, Italy

    Liangliang Yu

  5. ESA NEO Coordination Centre, Largo Galileo Galilei, 1, 00044 Frascati (RM), Italy

    Marco Fenucci

  6. School of Physics and Electronic Science, Guizhou Normal University, 550025, Guiyang, China

    Zhen Zhong

  7. Geodesy Observatory of Tahiti, University of French Polynesia, BP 6570, F-98702, Faa’a, Tahiti, French Polynesia

    Jean-Pierre Barriot

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  1. Lu Liu
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Appendix A

Appendix A

1.1 YARKOVSKY EFFECT DETECTION FOR HO3

This section describes the detection of the Yarkovsky effect for HO3. Ground-based optical astrometry data (right-ascension/declination), downloaded from the Minor Planet Center (https://minorplanetcenter.net), were used for the detection. The period of observation was from 17 March 2004 to 14 May 2021, with a total of 310 observations. The data were corrected using the debiasing scheme for star catalogue systematic errors proposed by Eggl et al. (2020) and weighted according to the method developed by Vereš et al. (2017). Outliers were rejected based on the scheme of Carpino et al. (2003) with a rejection threshold of \({{{{\chi }}}_{{{\text{rej}}}}} = 3\).

The detection process involved high-fidelity dynamical models. The primary gravitational force on this object was the point-mass gravitational perturbations from the Sun, eight planets, and the Moon. The positions of these bodies were extracted from DE441 (Park et al., 2021). Other small gravitational perturbations included point-mass perturbations from 16 main-belt asteroids and Pluto (Park et al., 2021; Farnocchia, 2021). Relativistic perturbations were applied from the Sun, eight planets, and the Moon, according to the Einstein–Infeld–Hoffman formulation (Moyer, 2005). Moreover, we considered the oblateness term in the geopotential of the Earth (Kaula, 1966) because HO3 is always within 1 au of the Earth. The Yarkovsky perturbation was modelled as a transverse acceleration of the form \({{a}_{t}} = {{A}_{2}}{{\left( {\frac{{{{r}_{0}}}}{r}} \right)}^{d}}\), where \({{A}_{2}}\) is a solved parameter, \({{r}_{0}} = 1~\) au is used as a normalisation factor, and r is the heliocentric distance (in au). \(d = 2\) is typically used for all asteroids for which complete thermophysical data are not available, and the same value was used in this study. Notably, the adopted model is computationally efficient and can capture the salient aspects of the Yarkovsky effect (Chesley et al., 2021, 2014).

Based on the abovementioned data and force models, a seven-dimensional orbital solution (Table A1) was computed using OrbFit5.0.7 software (http://adams.dm.unipi.it/orbfit/). The seven-dimensional orbital solution considered the Yarkovsky effect but without any a priori constraints. Moreover, we removed four outliers from the 310 available observations, leaving 306 positions in the final orbit fit.

Table 3. Table 1A. Orbital elements at epoch 2016-12-30 11:22:22.2765 TDT. The angles refer to the J2000 ecliptic frame. The reported uncertainties are marginal and correspond to the 1 – σ level. \({{\chi }^{2}}\) denotes the root mean square of normalised post-fit residuals
Full size table

Table A1 shows that the estimated A2 from the seven-dimensional solution is (–1.434 ± 0.410) \( \times {\text{\;}}\)10–13 au/d2. The Yarkovsky-induced semimajor axis drift was calculated as

$$\frac{{da}}{{dt}} = \frac{{2{{A}_{2}}(1 - {{e}^{2}})}}{{n{{p}^{2}}}},$$
(A.1)

where n is the mean motion, p is the semilatus rectum, and e is the eccentricity (Farnocchia et al., 2013). The Yarkovsky-induced semimajor axis drift is \(\frac{{da}}{{dt}} = \) (‒6.155 ± 1.758) × 10–3 au/Myr, which indicates that the current ground-based optical astrometry data can enable ~3.5σ detection of the Yarkovsky effect for HO3.

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Liu, L., Chen, Q., Yan, J. et al. Surface Thermal Inertia of Near-Earth Asteroid (469219) Kamo`oalewa: Statistical Estimation and Implications. Sol Syst Res 58, 469–479 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0038094624700321

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