The sensitivity to initial conditions of the co-orbital outcomes of lunar ejecta

Abstract

Lunar ejecta, produced by meteoroidal impacts, have been proposed for the origin of the near-Earth asteroid (469219) Kamo’oalewa, supported by its unusually Earth-like orbit and L-type reflectance spectrum (Sharkey et al., 2021). In a recent study (Castro-Cisneros et al. 2023), we found with N-body numerical simulations that the orbit of Kamo’oalewa is dynamically compatible with rare pathways of lunar ejecta captured into Earth’s co-orbital region, persistently transitioning between horseshoe and quasi-satellite (HS-QS) states. Subsequently, Jiao et al. (2024) found with hydrodynamic and N-body simulations that the geologically young lunar crater Giordano Bruno generated up to 300 Kamo’oalewa-sized escaping fragments, and up to three of those could have become Earth co-orbitals. However, these results are based upon specific initial conditions of the major planets in the Solar System, close to the current epoch. In particular, over megayear time spans, Earth’s eccentricity undergoes excursions up to five times its current value, potentially affecting the chaotic orbital evolution of lunar ejecta and their capture into Earth’s co-orbital regions. In the present work, we carry out additional numerical simulations to compute the statistics of co-orbital outcomes across different launch epochs, representative of the full range of Earth’s eccentricity values. Our main results are as follows: Kamo’oalewa-like co-orbital outcomes of lunar ejecta vary only slightly across the range of Earth’s orbital eccentricity, suggesting no privileged ejecta launching epoch for such objects; the probability of co-orbital outcomes decreases rapidly with increasing launch speed, but long-lived HS-QS states are favored at higher launch speeds.