Mars 1:2 (original) (raw)

Dear all

in the past I have discussed in this list about asteroids in some unusual resonances
and in particular in a recent publication in Icarus I showed there exist small
populations of asteroids in resonances
1:2 and 2:5 with Earth and I found new candidates for the resonance 1:2 with Venus.
Anyway I did not expect to discover a real "population" of resonant asteroids as
the Hildas for example. But, the point is that *there is* a population of
around 1000 asteroids evolving in the exterior resonance 1:2 with Mars at a=2.419 AU.
There is an article in press in Icarus explaining this issue.
An outreach web page in Spanish with some pictures and flash animations can be found at
www.fisica.edu.uy/\~gallardo/marte12
you can find also a preprint there.
I hope you can find it interesting.

Of course, this discovery would not have been possible without the observation programs
and the existence of databases like ASTORB, MPCORB and the ones from AstDys.

Regards

Tabare Gallardo