On the Possible Associations of Sporadic Meteors with Near-Earth Asteroids

In this paper, a method for selecting potential rubble pile near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is proposed. The method is based on statistical analysis of the number of asteroid associations with sporadic meteors from the Global Meteor Network (GMN) database, as well as the value of the of the minimum orbital distance between the Earth and the asteroid (MOID), its magnitude, and the rotation period. The number of associations was calculated for each asteroid i.e., the number of meteors with relatively close meteoroids’ orbits. To determine associations between NEAs and meteors, well known orbital dissimalrity criteria (D-criteria) were used: Southworth and Hawkins, Drummond criteria and Kholshevnikov metric. A meteor was associated with an asteroid if the D-criteria values between their orbits did not exceed selected thresholds. The method is based on the assumption that the proportion of associations in which meteors are genetically related to the asteroid in qestion is significant relative to the total number of associations. With that in mind, we impose a number of constraints regarding the orbits and the rotation periods of the NEAs. A table of asteroids with the largest number of associations which satisfy the imposed restrictions is provided. These asteroids are recommended for further study using polarimetric, photometric and other types of observations to verify whether they belong to the rubble pile type or not. We stress the importance of considering the distribution of the number of associations by dates, depending on the Earth’s orbital position, when moving on to the consideration of individual asteroids.