Migration of Jupiter-Family Comets and Resonant Asteroids to Near-Earth Space

Abstract

The orbital evolution of about 20000 Jupiter-crossing objects and 1500 resonant asteroids under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. The rate of their collisions with the terrestrial planets was estimated by computing the probabilities of collisions based on random-phase approximations and the orbital elements sampled with a 500 yr step. The Bulirsh-Stoer and a symplectic orbit integrators gave similar results for orbital evolution, but sometimes gave different collision probabilities with the Sun. For orbits close to that of Comet 2P, the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects with the terrestrial planets were greater by two orders of magnitude than for some other comets. For initial orbital elements close to those of Comets 2P, 10P, 44P and 113P, a few objects (~0.1%) got Earth-crossing orbits with semi-major axes a<2 AU and moved in such orbits for more than 1 Myr (up to tens or even hundreds of Myrs). Some of them even got inner-Earth orbits (i.e., with aphelion distance Q<0.983 AU) and Aten orbits. Most former trans-Neptunian objects that have typical near-Earth object orbits moved in such orbits for millions of years (if they did not disintegrate into mini-comets), so during most of this time they were extinct comets.