Tianwen-2 target asteroid (469219) Kamo'oalewa probably develops an Itokawa-compositional but ultra-highly space-weathered surface
Abstract
China's Tianwen-2 mission plans to return samples from a small, rapidly spinning Earth quasi-satellite (469219) Kamo'oalewa. Previous studies linked Kamo'oalewa to lunar composition and origin. Here, we propose another scenario. We reanalyzed the reflectance spectrum of Kamo'oalewa and obtained an absorption band center at 1.001+-0.028 um (error is 1sigma), consistent with LL chondrites. We then conducted space weathering (SW) experiments on meteorites and found that highly space-weathered LL chondrite powder (but not slab) successfully reproduced the reflectance spectrum of Kamo'oalewa. We further traced the dynamical origin of Kamo'oalewa and found that it probably originated from the v6 secular resonance, and more specifically, the Flora family. Kamo'oalewa exhibits a similar composition to Itokawa and 7 objects in the Flora family, but with a higher degree of space weathering. We, therefore, proposed that Kamo'oalewa probably originated from the Flora family and developed an Itokawa-compositional, highly space-weathered, fine-regolith-dominated surface.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.28102,
title = {Tianwen-2 target asteroid (469219) Kamo'oalewa probably develops an Itokawa-compositional but ultra-highly space-weathered surface},
author = {Pengfei Zhang and Guozheng Zhang and Zichen Wei and Mikael Granvik and Xiaoran Yan and Pengyue Wang and Qinwei Zhang and Ronghua Pang and Wen-Han Zhou and Te Jiang and Pierre Vernazza and Takahiro Hiroi and Edward Cloutis and Francesca DeMeo and Pierre Beck and Wing-Huen Ip and Marco Fenucci and Yongxiong Zhang and Michael Marsset and Yunbo Niu and Xuejin Lu and Xing Wu and Honglei Lin and Shoucun Hu and Bin Cheng and Haibin Zhao and Xiaobin Wang and Xiaoping Lu and Yonglong Zhang and Zongcheng Ling and Jiang Zhang and Sizhe Zhao and Cateline Lantz and Jooyeon Geem and Zhiping He and Juntao Wang and Liyong Zhou and Xiliang Zhang and Shijei Li and Sen Hu and Wei Yang and Xiongyao Li and Xiaoping Zhang and Jiahui Liu and Peng Zhang and Guang Zhang and Yangting Lin and Yang Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.28102},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
28 pages, 8 figures, under revision in Nature Communications