Bibcode
Lazzaro, D.; Duffard, R.; de Leon, J.; Licandro, J.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #36, #32.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 36, p.1138
Advertised on:
11
2004
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Basaltic asteroids, classified as V-type in all taxonomies, are quite
rare among the asteroid population. They are spectrally similar to 4
Vesta and to the basaltic achondrite meteorites, specifically the
Eucrites, the Diogenites and the Howardites, known as HED meteorites. It
has been suggested that all these objects, V-type asteroids and HED
meteorites, are genetically linked to Vesta.
In a previous work we investigated the mineralogy of several V-type
asteroids in the neighborhood of Vesta (Duffard et al. 2004) showing
that the distribution of their spectral parameters is rather distinct
from that of HED meteorites as given by Gaffey et al. (1993). The sample
of basaltic asteroids analyzed was then increased with the observation
of three V-type Near Earth Asteroids. The reflectance spectra of these
objects were obtained at the 3.6m Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) and
at the 2.5m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) covering the near-infrared
and visible range, respectively. Spectral parameters were then obtained
using two methods as described in Gaffey et al. (2002) and Sunshine et
al. (1990).
We also performed similar analysis on a sample of HED meteorites
consisting of 29 Eucrites, 14 Howardites and 10 Diogenites whose spectra
were taken from the RELAB public database at Brown University. This
resulted in a new definition of the spectral parameter space for the HED
meteorites, slightly different from that given by Gaffey et al. (1993).
However, when we plot the parameters computed for the sample of V-type
asteroids, those near Vesta and those in Near-Earth orbits, we note a
greater spread of values, most of them outside the HED region. This
result will be discussed on view of its implication on the possible
genetic link between V-type asteroids and HED meteorites.
This work has been supported by CNPq and FAPERJ.