Lunar Cataclysm from the Break-Up of the Mesosiderite Parent Body

Details Lunar Cataclysm from the Break-Up of the Mesosiderite Parent Body Lunar Cataclysm from the Break-Up of the Mesosiderite Parent Body

May 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dda....41.0606c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #41, #6.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.932

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

New interpretations of crater size-distribution (Cuk et al. 2010) and remnant basin magnetization (Mohit et al. 2010) point to a break in lunar cratering history close to the end of the Nectarian period. In this view, almost all Nectarian basins formed much before 3.9 Gyr ago, possible even before 4.2 Gyr ago (in agreement with recent re-evaluation of the Apollo 16 samples; Norman et al. 2010). More recent basins (including Imbrium) appear to have formed in a short-lived bombardment spike (the "true" lunar cataclysm) following a period of lower impact activity. The size distribution of these Imbrian impactors was unlike that of main-belt asteroids, which appear to have dominated Nectarian and pre-Nectarian impacts. As this spike was not caused by any known small body population, we favor its origin in a tidal break-up of a single large body in the terrestrial planet region. Existence of an additional D>400 km asteroidal body that was still intact until at least 3.9 Gyr ago has already been suggested based on the cooling histories of mesosiderite meteorites (Haack et al. 1996, Bogard and Garrison 1998). We propose that the mesosiderite parent body resided in the region between Mars and the asteroid belt for hundreds of Myrs, only to be destabilized and tidally disrupted by a terrestrial planet (cf. Chambers 2007). While most of this body's fragments would impact the Sun and the planets, some may have chaotically diffused into stable orbits to become intermediate parent bodies of mesosiderites. Both the survival of mesosiderite fragments and the complete extinction of the low-i trans-Martian population both point to a relatively high early eccentricity of Mars, which has since decreased due to global chaos. We expect that the present-day direct parent of mesosiderites is most likely in or close to the Hungaria high-inclination asteroid group.

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