] The Koronis or Koronian family (), also known as the Lacrimosa family, is a very large asteroid family of stony asteroids, located in 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, c ...

. They are thought to have been formed at least two billion years ago in a catastrophic collision between two larger bodies. The family is named after 158 Koronis, and the largest known member ( 208 Lacrimosa) is about in diameter. The Koronis family travels in a cluster along the same orbit. It has 5949 members. This family has two subfamilies. The

Karin family The Karin family or Karin cluster is an asteroid family and sub-group of the Koronis family. It consists of at least 90 main-belt asteroids. What makes them special is that scientists have used the orbits of 13 members to calculate backwards until t ...

() was formed remarkably recently in a catastrophic collision (destroying the parent body), with an estimated age of 5.72 million years. The Koronis(2) family () with 246 members is the other. It formed 15 million years ago by a non-catastrophic collision with 158 Koronis. On August 28, 1993, the Galileo spacecraft visited a member of this family,

243 Ida Ida, minor planet designation 243 Ida, is an asteroid in the Koronis family of the asteroid belt. It was discovered on 29 September 1884 by Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa at Vienna Observatory and named after a nymph from Greek mythology. ...

. A photo of Ida (and its tiny moon Dactyl) is part of the composite image at right (numbered 243).

Large members

References

External links

Astronomical studies of the Koronis Family

Spins on Koronis family
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151105190530/http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/scitech/display.cfm?ST_ID=21 , date=2015-11-05 * Koronis