What makes a family reliable?

Abstract

Asteroid families are clusters of asteroids in proper element space which are thought to be fragments from former collisions. Studies of families promise to improve understanding of large collision events and a large event can open up the interior of a former parent body to view. While a variety of searches for families have found the same heavily populated families, and some searches have found the same families of lower population, there is much apparent disagreement between proposed families of lower population of different investigations. Indicators of reliability, factors compromising reliability, an illustration of the influence of different data samples, and a discussion of how several investigations perceived families in the same region of proper element space are given.