TY - JOUR
T1 - Round up the unusual suspects
T2 - Near-Earth Asteroid 17274 (2000 LC16) a plausible D-type parent body of the Tagish Lake meteorite
AU - Gartrelle, Gordon M.
AU - Hardersen, Paul S.
AU - Izawa, Matthew R.M.
AU - Nowinski, Matthew C.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Brian Burt and Szilard Galay for developing and providing the code nuclei on which our model code is based. We express our deep gratitude to Francesca DeMeo and Joshua Emery who generously provided their IRTF D-type spectra and invaluable guidance to improve our understanding of D-types and Jovian Trojans. We would also like to thank Paul Abell, Wayne Barkhouse, and Michael Gaffey for their insightfully honest critical feedback. We greatly appreciate the technical input and editorial support of Ron Fevig, Tomoki Nakamura, and Ted Roush. Special thanks to Maria Antonella Barucci, Rick Binzel, Tom Burbine, Deborah Domingue, and Faith Vilas for their inspiration and mentoring. We are also immensely grateful to James Casler, recently retired from the University of North Dakota, for his creative leadership, sincere support, and executive oversight. Finally, we thank our anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments and candor. This research utilizes spectra acquired by the authors with data obtained from the NASA RELAB facility at Brown University. Details of the RELAB facility are available at the RELAB web site (http://www.planetary.brown.edu/relab/). This study was performed using joint-user facilities of the Institute for Planetary Materials, Okayama University. We express deep appreciation and thanks to the Institute for their gracious hospitality, support, and cooperation. Finally, we are immensely grateful to the entire team at NASA/IRTF for their help, and are especially thankful for the contribution of the people of Hawaii who offered use of their sacred land from which we observed the heavens.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Inc.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Asteroids are the origin point for most meteorites impacting Earth. Terrestrial meteorite samples provide evidence of what actually occurred in the early solar system at the formation location of the meteorite, and when it occurred. The ability to connect a meteorite sample to an asteroid parent body provides its starting location as a meteoroid. To date, only a handful of chondritic meteorite types have been credibly connected to an asteroid parent. For the past two decades, D-type asteroids, a dark, spectrally reddish, and featureless taxonomic type have been speculated to be the parent body of the tiny family of ungrouped chondrites. These include the Tagish Lake Meteorite (TLM), a ~ 4 m meteorite “fall” in Canada's Yukon territory recovered in 2000. The quest to identify the TLM parent has been a baffling one as D-type asteroids are dominant among the Jovian Trojans, rare in main asteroid belt, and extremely rare in the inner asteroid belt as well as Near-Earth space. This study employed Near Infrared (NIR) spectra (0.7–2.45 μm) of 86 D-types and a variety of analysis techniques including visual analysis, slope analysis, curve fitting, Fréchet analysis, dynamical analysis and Shkuratov radiative transfer theory to search for the TLM parent body. Sixteen TLM samples from the NASA Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB) plus five additional mineralogically well-constrained samples measured using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Rietveld refinement were compared to D-type asteroid spectra. Our results indicate, out of several promising candidates, Near-Earth asteroid 17274 (2006 LC16), a ~ 3 km diameter Amor asteroid is a plausible parent body for TLM.
AB - Asteroids are the origin point for most meteorites impacting Earth. Terrestrial meteorite samples provide evidence of what actually occurred in the early solar system at the formation location of the meteorite, and when it occurred. The ability to connect a meteorite sample to an asteroid parent body provides its starting location as a meteoroid. To date, only a handful of chondritic meteorite types have been credibly connected to an asteroid parent. For the past two decades, D-type asteroids, a dark, spectrally reddish, and featureless taxonomic type have been speculated to be the parent body of the tiny family of ungrouped chondrites. These include the Tagish Lake Meteorite (TLM), a ~ 4 m meteorite “fall” in Canada's Yukon territory recovered in 2000. The quest to identify the TLM parent has been a baffling one as D-type asteroids are dominant among the Jovian Trojans, rare in main asteroid belt, and extremely rare in the inner asteroid belt as well as Near-Earth space. This study employed Near Infrared (NIR) spectra (0.7–2.45 μm) of 86 D-types and a variety of analysis techniques including visual analysis, slope analysis, curve fitting, Fréchet analysis, dynamical analysis and Shkuratov radiative transfer theory to search for the TLM parent body. Sixteen TLM samples from the NASA Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB) plus five additional mineralogically well-constrained samples measured using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Rietveld refinement were compared to D-type asteroid spectra. Our results indicate, out of several promising candidates, Near-Earth asteroid 17274 (2006 LC16), a ~ 3 km diameter Amor asteroid is a plausible parent body for TLM.
KW - Asteroids
KW - D-type asteroids
KW - Meteorite parent body
KW - Shkuratov radiative transfer modeling
KW - Tagish Lake meteorite
KW - Ungrouped chondrites
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U2 - 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114349
DO - 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114349
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102255991
VL - 361
JO - Icarus
JF - Icarus
SN - 0019-1035
M1 - 114349
ER -