Search and Study for Meteorites Analogous to DidymosOPEN ACCESS
G. Massa, E. Palomba, A. Longobardo, F. Dirri, M. Angrisani, C. Gisellu, D. Polishook, A. S. Rivkin, C. Thomas
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Published: 01 March 2024
“The Hera mission will arrive at the Didymos system to study the efficiency of momentum transfer and to further investigate the binary system in great detail after the DART mission impact. We took advantage of two online databases of meteorites spectra and of recent Didymos spectra taken before and after the DART impact. We performed a first selection based on the comparison of the band center values of the silicate absorption bands (localized at 1 and 2 µm) between Didymos and the meteorites. A second selection was made defining a 4-dimensional space parameter whose dimensions were the band depth and the slope of the two bands, normalized to Didymos values. We introduced a distance measure to find the closest meteorites to Didymos in this space. Finally, we made the last selection based on other criteria, such as the presence of different spectra of the same meteorite, the presence of different spectra from different databases, and the comparison with the literature. The result of this work is a list of six meteorites that are the most analogous to Didymos system. We also found out that Didymos is most probably mainly composed of L/LL ordinary chondrites, with a preference for the LL sub-type. From our list of meteorites, we were able to estimate the normalized abundance of olivine and pyroxene of Didymos. Finally, a match between Didymos and OC meteorites was also found in the MIR range.”
