Near-infrared spectroscopic survey of B-type asteroids: Compositional analysis

We present near-infrared spectra of 23 B-type asteroids obtained with the NICS camera-spectrograph at the 3.56 m Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. We also compile additional visible and near-infrared spectra of another 22 B-type asteroids from the literature. A total of 45 B-types are analyzed. No significant trends in orbital properties of our sample were detected when compared with all known B-types and all known asteroids. The reflectance spectra of the asteroids in the 0.8–2.5 μm range show a continuous shape variation, from a monotonic negative (blue) slope to a positive (red) slope. This continuous spectral trend is filling the gap between the two main groups of B-types published by Clark et al. ([2010]. J. Geophys. Res., 115, 6005–6027). We found no clear correlations between the spectral slope and the asteroids’ sizes or heliocentric distances. We apply a clustering technique to reduce the volume of data to six optimized “average spectra” or “centroids”, representative of the whole sample. These centroids are then compared against meteorite spectra from the RELAB database. We found carbonaceous chondrites as the best meteorite analogs for the six centroids. There is a progressive change in analogs that correlates with the spectral slope: from CM2 chondrites (water-rich, aqueously altered) for the reddest centroid, to CK4 chondrites (dry, heated/thermally altered) for the bluest one.