Physics
Scientific paper
Mar 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001m%26ps...36..371m&link_type=abstract
Meteoritics & Planetary Science, vol. 36, no. 3, p. 371-380
Physics
32
Scientific paper
We show that at the end of the main accretional period of the terrestrial planets, a few percent of the initial planetesimal population in the 1-2~A.U zone is left on highly-inclined orbits in the inner solar system. The final depletion of this leftover population would cause an extended bombardment of all of the terrestrial planets, slowly decaying with a time scale of order 60~Ma. Because of the large impact velocities dictated by the high inclinations, these projectiles would produce craters much larger than those formed by asteroids of equal size on typical current Near-Earth asteroid orbits: on the Moon, basins could have been formed by bodies as small as 20~km in diameter, and 10~km craters could be produced by 400~m impactors. To account for the observed lunar crater record, the initial population of highly--inclined leftovers would need to be a few times that presently in the main asteroid belt, at all sizes, in agreement with the simulations of the primordial sculpting of both these populations. If a terminal lunar cataclysm (a spike in the crater record ~3.9 Ga ago) really occurred on the Moon, it was not caused by the highly--inclined leftover population, because of the monotonic decay of the latter.
Chambers John
Gladman Brett
Morbidelli Alessandro
Petit Jean-Marc
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