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Detailed images of highly porous small bodies show variety of the surface. One of the interesting findings is that the depressions on comets look shallower than the simple craters such as on the moon, that is the depth-to-diameter ratio of the depressions is smaller than ∼0.2. Although the mechanisms for the formation of the depression are controversial; such as collapse after the sublimation of the...
The outcome of collision between small solid bodies is characterized by the threshold energy density Q ⁎s , the specific energy to shatter, that is defined as the ratio of projectile kinetic energy to the target mass (or the sum of target and projectile) needed to produce the largest intact fragment that contains one half the target mass. It is indicated theoretically and by numerical...
Iron meteorites and some M-class asteroids are generally understood to be fragments that were originally part of cores of differentiated planetesimals or part of local melt pools on primitive bodies. The parent bodies of iron meteorites may have formed in the terrestrial planet region, from which they were then scattered into the main belt (Bottke, W.F., Nesvorný, D., Grimm, R.E., Morbidelli, A.,...
Chondrites are one of the major groups of meteorites. They consist of spherical objects called chondrules, which are typically (sub-)millimeter-sized, and fine-grained matrix between the chondrules. There exists a variety of models on the formation of chondrules, most of which have in common that chondrules were formed at some local place in the protoplanetary disk and later incorporated into the...
Ejecta patterns are experimentally examined around craters formed in a layer of glass beads by vertical impacts at low velocities. The diameters of the constituent glass beads of three different targets range 53–63μm, 90–106μm, and 355–500μm. The impact velocities and ambient pressures range from a few to 240ms −1 and from 500Pa to the atmospheric pressure, respectively. Various ejecta patterns...
Small primitive bodies were presumably highly porous when they formed and some still have low densities that are indicative of a high pore content. Therefore, after their formation, interplanetary dust impacting on their surface may have been captured because of their porous structure. The mechanism of dust penetration is thus of importance to understand the evolution of small bodies and the origin...
Previous laboratory impact experiments into sand and glass beads have enriched our understanding of the cratering process on granular media common on asteroids and planetary regolith. However, less attention has been paid to the fate of the projectile, such as its penetration depth in the granular medium, although this may be important for the regolith mixing process. We conducted laboratory experiments...
A large number of cometary dust particles were captured with low-density silica aerogels by NASA’s Stardust Mission. Knowledge of the details of the capture mechanism of hypervelocity particles in silica aerogel is needed in order to correctly derive the original particle features from impact tracks. However, the mechanism has not been fully understood yet. We shot hard spherical projectiles of several...
Porous internal structure is common among small bodies in the planetary systems and possible range of porosity, strength, and scale of in-homogeneity is wide. Icy agglomerates, such as icy dust aggregates in the proto-planetary disks or icy re-accumulated bodies of fragments from impact disruption beyond snow-line would have stronger bulk strength once the component particles physically connect each...
We performed low-velocity impact experiments of gypsum spheres with porosity ranging from 0 to 61% and diameter ranging from 25 to 83 mm. The impact velocity was from 0.2 to 22 m/s. The target was an iron plate. The outcome of gypsum spheres with porosity 31–61% was different from those of non-porous ice [Higa M., Arakawa, M., Maeno, N., 1996. Planet. Space Sci. 44, 917–925; Higa M., Arakawa, M.,...
In this paper, we compare the outcome of high-velocity impact experiments on porous targets, composed of pumice, with the results of simulations by a 3D SPH hydrocode in which a porosity model has been implemented. The different populations of small bodies of our Solar System are believed to be composed, at least partially, of objects with a high degree of porosity. To describe the fragmentation of...
We determined the morphologies and dimensions of possible impact craters on the surface of Asteroid 25143 Itokawa from images taken by the Hayabusa spacecraft. Circular depressions, circular features with flat floors or convex floors, and circular features with smooth surfaces were identified as possible craters. The survey identified 38 candidates with widely varying morphologies including rough,...
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