Dynamical effects of heavy bombardment of the regular moons of Saturn

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In the Nice model, a huge amount of mass from the primordial Kuiper Belt encountered the giant planets. The interlopers took two forms - small bodies (planetesimals) and other planets. Tsiganis et al. (2005) showed that the regular satellites of Saturn probably would have survived encounters with the ice giants, but the irregular satellites would have been stripped. Here we investigate the effects on the orbits of the Saturnian satellites Mimas-Iapetus due to gravitational scattering by, and collisions with, the planetesimals. We calculate the effects of some 10^8 planetesimals traversing the region of the regular satellites during the 10^8 years after the planet-crossing phase of the Nice model by direct integration, using SyMBA (Duncan et al. 1998). Most of the encounters take place during the first 20 Myr. The orbital distribution of the planetesimals when they enter Saturn's Hill sphere is taken from Nesvorný et al. (2007) and Vokrouhlický et al. (2008). We assume that the planetesimals have a broken power-law size distribution, based on recent results on the Kuiper Belt (Fuentes et al. 2009, Fraser and Kavelaars 2009). We will present our preliminary numerical results and will compare them with the analytic model of Collins and Sari (2008). This research was sponsored by a grant from the NASA Origins program to CRC.

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