Capture probability in the 3:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter: An application to the Vesta family

Abstract

We study the capture and crossing probabilities in the 3:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter for a small asteroid that migrates from the inner to the middle Main Belt under the action of the Yarkovsky effect. We use an algebraic mapping of the averaged planar restricted three-body problem based on the symplectic mapping of Hadjidemetriou (Celest Mech Dyn Astron 56:563-599, 1993), adding the secular variations of the orbit of Jupiter and non-symplectic terms to simulate the migration. We found that, for fast migration rates, the captures occur at discrete windows of initial eccentricities whose specific locations depend on the initial resonant angles, indicating that the capture phenomenon is not probabilistic. For slow migration rates, these windows become narrower and start to accumulate at low eccentricities, generating a region of mutual overlap where the capture probability tends to 100 %, in agreement with the theoretical predictions for the adiabatic regime. Our simulations allow us to predict the capture probabilities in both the adiabatic and non-adiabatic cases, in good agreement with results of Gomes (Celest Mech Dyn Astron 61:97-113, 1995) and Quillen (Mon Not RAS 365:1367-1382, 2006). We apply our model to the case of the Vesta asteroid family in the same context as Roig et al. (Icarus 194:125-136, 2008), and found results indicating that the high capture probability of Vesta family members into the 3:1 mean motion resonance is basically governed by the eccentricity of Jupiter and its secular variations. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.