Impact origin of the Vesta family

Mathematics – Logic

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The compelling petrographic link (Consolmagno and Drake 1979; Gaffey 1983) between basaltic achondrite meteorites and the ~530 km diameter asteroid 4 Vesta has been tempered by a perceived difficulty in launching rocks from this asteroid's surface at speeds sufficient to bring them to Earth (Wasson and Wetherill 1979) without obliterating Vesta's signature crust. I address this impasse in response to recent imaging (Zellner et al. 1996; Dumas and Hainaut 1996) of a ~450 km impact basin across Vesta's southern hemisphere (Thomas et al. 1997), and model the basin-forming collision using a detailed 2D hydrocode with brittle fracture including self-gravitational compression (cf. Asphaug and Melosh 1993). A ~42 km diameter asteroid striking Vesta's basaltic crust (atop a denser mantle and iron core) at 5.4 km/s launches multi-km fragments up to ~600 m/s without inverting distal stratigraphy, according to the code. This modeling, together with collisional, dynamical, rheological and exposure-age timescales (Marzari et al 1996; Welten et al 1996) and observations of V-type asteroids (Binzel and Xu 1993) suggests a recent (<~1Ga) impact origin for the Vesta family, and a possible Vesta origin for Earth-approaching V-type asteroids (Cruikshank et al. 1991).

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