4997 Ksana, provisional designation , is a carbonaceous Palladian
asteroid
An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere.
...
from the outer region of the
asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...
, approximately 10 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 6 October 1986, by Russian astronomer
Lyudmila Karachkina
Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina (russian: Людмила Георгиевна Карачкина, born 3 September 1948, Rostov-on-Don) is an astronomer and discoverer of minor planets.
In 1978 she began as a staff astronomer of the Institute for ...
at
Crimean Astrophysical Observatory
The Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (CrAO, List of observatory codes, obs. code: IAU code#095, 095) is located at Nauchnij research campus, near the Central Crimean city of Bakhchysarai, on the Crimean peninsula. CrAO is often called ...
on the Crimean peninsula. The asteroid was named for Russian chemist Kseniya Nessler.
Orbit and classification
''Ksana'' is a small member of the
Pallas family The Pallas family (''adj. Palladian''; ) is a small asteroid family of B-type asteroids at very high inclinations in the intermediate asteroid belt.
The namesake of the family is 2 Pallas, an extremely large asteroid with a mean diameter of about 5 ...
(), a small
asteroid family
An asteroid family is a population of asteroids that share similar proper orbital elements, such as semimajor axis, eccentricity, and orbital inclination. The members of the families are thought to be fragments of past asteroid collisions. An a ...
of carbonaceous B-type asteroids. It orbits the Sun in the