Mass and density of B-type asteroid (702) Alauda

Abstract

Observations with the adaptive optics system on the Very Large Telescope reveal that outer main belt asteroid (702) Alauda has a small satellite with primary to secondary diameter ratio of $\sim$56. The secondary revolves around the primary in 4.9143 $\pm$ 0.007 days at a distance of 1227 $\pm$ 24 km, yielding a total system mass of (6.057 $\pm$ 0.36) $\times$ 10${}^{18}$ kg. Combined with an IRAS size measurement, our data yield a bulk density for this B-type asteroid of 1570 $\pm$ 500 kg~m${}^{-3}$.

In press, ApJ 2011. 6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Binary Asteroid Systems: Tidal End States and Estimates of Material Properties
• Identification of Magnetite in B-type Asteroids
• Binaries in the Kuiper Belt
• Orbits, masses, and evolution of main belt triple (87) Sylvia

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