Pallas family

The Pallas family (adj. Palladian; FIN: 801) is a small asteroid family of B-type asteroids at very high inclinations in the intermediate asteroid belt.^[1][2] The family was identified by Kiyotsugu Hirayama in 1928.

The namesake of the family is 2 Pallas, an extremely large asteroid with a mean diameter of about 512 km.^[3] The remaining Palladian asteroids are far smaller; the largest is 5222 Ioffe with an estimated diameter of 22 km. This, along with the preponderance of the otherwise rare B spectral type among its members, indicates that this is likely a cratering family composed of ejecta from impacts on Pallas.

Another suspected Palladian is 3200 Phaethon, the parent body of the Geminid meteor shower.^[4]

Location and structure of the Pallas family.

From the diagram, their proper orbital elements lie in the approximate ranges

	ap	ep	ip
min	2.71 AU	0.25	32°
max	2.79 AU	0.31	34°

At the present epoch, the range of osculating orbital elements of the members (by comparison to the MPCORB database ) is about

	a	e	i
min	2.71 AU	0.13	30°
max	2.79 AU	0.37	38°