The olivine-dominated composition of the Eureka family of Mars Trojan asteroids

Abstract

We have used the XSHOOTER echelle spectrograph on the European Southern Obseratory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) to obtain UVB-VIS-NIR (ultraviolet-blue (UVB), visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR)) reflectance spectra of two members of the Eureka family of L5 Mars Trojans, in order to test a genetic relationship to Eureka. In addition to obtaining spectra, we also carried out VRI photometry of one of the VLT targets using the 2-m telescope at the Bulgarian National Astronomical Observatory - Rozhen and the two-channel focal reducer. We found that these asteroids belong to the olivine-dominated A, or Sa, taxonomic class. As Eureka itself is also an olivine-dominated asteroid, it is likely that all family asteroids share a common origin and composition. We discuss the significance of these results in terms of the origin of the martian Trojan population.

7 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (4)

• Empirical Color Transformations Between SDSS Photometry and Other Photometric Systems
• Flux calibration of medium-resolution spectra from 300 nm to 2500 nm: Model reference spectra and telluric correction
• Composition of the L5 Mars Trojans: Neighbors, not Siblings
• Yarkovsky-Driven Spreading of the Eureka Family of Mars Trojans

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• Is the Eureka cluster a collisional family of Mars Trojan asteroids?
• Dynamics of 2023 FW14, the second L4 Mars trojan, and a physical characterization using the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias
• The Stability of Uranus Trojans Over the Age of the Solar System
• New asteroid clusters and evidence of collisional fragmentation in the L5 Trojan cloud of Mars