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Analysis of potential locations of asteroidal moonlets
In this study, the potential locations of asteroidal small satellites (also
called moonlets) with quasi-circular mutual orbit are analyzed. For the motion
of the moonlets, only the solar gravity perturbation and the primary's 2nd
degree-and-order gravity field are considered. By eliminating of short periodic
terms, the dynamical behavior of the Hamiltonian for the moonlets is
investigated. The observational data of some high size ratio binary asteroids
show that the orbits of the moonlets lie close to the classical Laplace
equilibria, which reach global minimum values of the Hamiltonian. It is found
that tides or Yarkovsky effects alone cannot account for the reason why the
orbits of asteroidal moonlets are not exactly at the classical Laplace
equilibria. The analysis in this study is expected to provide useful
information for the potential locations of asteroidal moonlets, and contribute
to principles to relate predictions to observations
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