Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine

Details Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.5506k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #55.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.499

Statistics

Computation

Scientific paper

We describe a series of calculations of low-speed collisions of km-scale rubble piles (i.e. asteroids or planetesimals), similar to previous work (Korycansky and Asphaug 2006). The rubble piles are aggregates of polyhedra held together by gravity and friction. Collision velocities are typically of order 1 to 100 m/sec.In this work we make use of a so-called "physics engine" to solve the equations of rigid-body motion and collisions of the polyhedra. Such code libraries have been primarily developed for computer simulations and games. The chief advantage of these libraries is the inclusion of sophisticated algorithms for collision detection, which we have found to be the main computational bottleneck in our calculations. The package we have used is the Open Dynamics Engine, a freely available open-source library (www.ode.org). It solves the equations of motion to first-order accuracy in time and utilizes a fast algorithm for collision detection. We have found a factor of approximately 30 speed-up for our calculations, allowing the exploration of a much larger range of parameter space and the running of multiple calculations in order to sample the stochasticity of the results. For the calculations we report on here, the basic model is the collision of an impactor in the range 0.1--1 km in diameter with a target of 1 km diameter.argets are modeled with 1000 polyhedral elements and impactors modeled with 1 to 1000 elements depending on mass. Collisions of objects with both equal-mass elements, and elements chosen from a power-law distribution, are studied. We concentrate on determining the energy required for catastrophic disruption (Q*D) as a function of impactor/target mass atio and impactor parameter for off-center collisions.
This work has been supported by NASA Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program grant NNX07AQ04G.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Rubble-pile Simulations Using The Open Dynamics Engine will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1439598