Flora family

While the largest members, 8 Flora and 43 Ariadne, are located near the edge, there are several distinct groupings within the family, possibly created by later, secondary collisions.

A noticeable fraction of the parent body has been lost from the family since the original impact, presumably due to later processes such as secondary collisions.

The Flora family is very broad and gradually fades into the background population (which is particularly dense in this part of space) in such a way that its boundaries are very poorly defined.

Studies of Gaspra suggests that the family's age is of the order of 200 million years (indicated by the crater density), and that the parent body was at least partially differentiated (indicated by the high abundance of olivine) (Veverka 1994).

A search of a recent proper element database (AstDys)for 96944 minor planets in 2005 yielded 7438 objects lying within the rectangular-shaped region defined by the first table above.

The few interlopers that have been identified are all small (Florczak et al. 1998, and also by inspection of the PDS asteroid taxonomy data set for non S-type members.)

They include 298 Baptistina, 422 Berolina, 2093 Genichesk, 2259 Sofievka (the largest, with a 21 km diameter), 2952 Lilliputia, 453 Tea, 3533 Toyota, 3850 Peltier, 3875 Staehle, 4278 Harvey, 4396 Gressmann, and 4750 Mukai.