1,3,5- 1Southwest Research Institute , San Antonio, United States of America (anicia.arredondo@swri.org)
- 2NASA Ames Research Center, Moffat Field, CA 94035, USA
- 3Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 20146, USA
- 4Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
- 5Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
The new Polana collisional family is the hypothesized origin of the near-Earth asteroids (101955) Bennu, which was the target of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, and (162173) Ryugu, which was the target of the JAXA Hayabusa2 mission. We present JWST NIRSpec and MIRI spectroscopy of the parent body of the family, (142) Polana, and compare it with spacecraft and laboratory data of both near-Earth asteroids. We find that the near-infrared spectrum of Polana is similar to that of the returned sample from both Bennu and Ryugu, but has a slope that differs from that of the global average spectra taken by both spacecraft. The mid-infrared Polana spectrum differs in shape from the global average spectrum of Bennu, possibly because of porosity, space weathering, or grain size. Spectral features at similar wavelengths in the spectra of Polana and Bennu and Ryugu support the hypothesis that both asteroids originated in the Polana family.
How to cite: Arredondo, A., Becker, T., McAdam, M., Rivkin, A., Jarmak, S., and Wong, I.: JWST spectroscopy of the parent body of the new Polana collisional family , EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025, Helsinki, Finland, 7–12 Sep 2025, EPSC-DPS2025-938, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc-dps2025-938, 2025.
