| Name: Chetan Bora |
| Affiliation: Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad |
| Conference ID: ASI2026_929 |
| Title: Tracing the Dynamical Origins and Past Evolution of Near-Earth Asteroids |
| Abstract Type: Poster |
| Abstract Category: Sun, Solar System, Exoplanets, and Astrobiology |
| Author(s) and Co-Author(s) with Affiliation: Chetan Abhijnanam Bora(Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad, Dhanbad - 826004, India), Badam Singh Kushvah(Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad, Dhanbad - 826004, India) |
| Abstract: Understanding the dynamical pathways that deliver asteroids into near-Earth orbits is critical for source-region inference and impact-risk assessment. We test whether short backward integrations encode sufficient information to discriminate NEAs with prior outer-Solar-System origins from long-term inner-Solar-System residents. Using 0.2~Myr backward integrations, we extract time series of primary orbital elements and train sequence-based classifiers to map orbital histories to distinct dynamical pathways. The models achieve classification accuracies of 86--88\% and ROC AUC values of $\sim$0.95, substantially outperforming simple temporal baselines. Remarkably, classifiers trained using eccentricity alone perform nearly as well as those incorporating both semi-major axis and eccentricity, indicating that eccentricity evolution is a particularly sensitive tracer of recent dynamical transport and orbital decoupling. Feature-attribution analyses show that early-time variations in semi-major axis and late-stage eccentricity growth dominate the classification, consistent with secular perturbations and resonance-driven transfers between the outer and inner Solar System. Extending the analysis to 1~Myr backward integrations for a large NEA sample, we find that more than 97\% remain on Earth- or Mars-crossing orbits throughout this interval, implying that only a small fraction follow backward trajectories compatible with outer-Solar-System origin. These results demonstrate that short orbital histories provide a physically interpretable and computationally efficient diagnostic of recent NEA origins, complementing traditional long-term $N$-body studies and offering a scalable framework applicable to other small-body populations. |
