Formalism for the Impact Rate of Comets on the Inner Satellites and Rings of the Giant Planets

Details Formalism for the Impact Rate of Comets on the Inner Satellites and Rings of the Giant Planets Formalism for the Impact Rate of Comets on the Inner Satellites and Rings of the Giant Planets

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.0207d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #2.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.944

Mathematics

Probability

Scientific paper

Determining the rate at which ecliptic comets have struck the satellites of the giant planets throughout the history of the Solar System is important for understanding the formation and evolution of satellites and planetary rings (e.g., Charnoz et al. 2009, Barr et al. 2010). Impact rates are often calculated using Öpik's equations (Shoemaker and Wolfe 1982), which give the impact probability of a small body with a satellite in terms of the small body's pericenter distance (q), orbital eccentricity (e), and inclination (i). Zahnle et al. (1998, 2003) performed Monte Carlo simulations that implement Öpik's equations and have tabulated impact rates for a wide variety of satellites. These simulations assume a distribution of present-day encounter speeds (U) based on simulations by Levison and Duncan (1997). However, encounter speeds probably would have been larger during the era of heavy bombardment (Charnoz et al. 2009). We have developed an analytical approach to calculate satellite impact rates, relative to the rate on their parent planet, as a function of U. Our approach assumes that the orbital distribution of ecliptic comets that encounter a planet is isotropic in the frame of the planet (Levison et al. 2000). Our results agree well with those of Zahnle et al. (1998, 2003), and with numerical integrations carried out with the 'scatter3' routine in STARLAB (http://www.sns.ias.edu/ starlab/). We thank the NASA CDAP and Origins programs for support.
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Barr, A.C., Canup, R.M., Nature Geoscience 3, 164-167 (2010)
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Shoemaker, E.M., Wolfe, R.F., in Satellites of Jupiter, pp. 277-339 (1982)
Zahnle, K., Dones, L., Levison, H.F., Icarus 136, 202-222 (1998)
Zahnle, K., et al., Icarus 163, 263-289 (2003)

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