The orbital dynamics of asteroid 469219 Kamo'oalewa

Abstract

The study of orbital dynamics and evolution of Solar system small-bodies like asteroids has been conducted regularly with the latest data to ensure and update our understanding of the object's motion, especially the ones located nearby the Earth. One of its examples is asteroid 469219 Kamo'oalewa, which currently known as an Earth Quasi-satellite (QS). In this article, we investigate the orbital dynamics of 469219 Kamo'oalewa by running an N-body numerical integration. It was calculated from its latest orbital solution at epoch JD 2458600.5 using Gauss-Radau scheme provided by IAS15 integrator, which available on REBOUND code package. We found that the co-orbital motion of the asteroid towards Earth happens during time interval (-19.7,19.5) thousand years, with QS-HS transition happening at that period. The current QS motion started 15 years ago and will be transitioning to HS at around 50 years from now. After losing its current state, it will orbit the Sun near the Earth as an Apollo asteroid. We also investigated the secular evolution of this asteroid and found the result that support its QS-HS transition nature. On some occasions like a long period of HS, we found several orbital characteristics that resemble Kozai-Lidov resonance, but it doesn't hold long before the transition to QS resumes.