Fragment Properties at the Catastrophic Disruption Threshold: The Effect of the Parent Body's Internal Structure

Details Fragment Properties at the Catastrophic Disruption Threshold: The Effect of the Parent Body's Internal Structure Fragment Properties at the Catastrophic Disruption Threshold: The Effect of the Parent Body's Internal Structure

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.5006j&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #50.06

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We present numerical simulations of asteroid break-ups, including both the fragmentation of the parent body and the gravitational interactions between the fragments. The simulations are aimed at studying the so-called catastrophic disruption energy threshold Q*D, which results in the escape of half of the target's mass. Thanks to our recent implementation of a model of fragmentation of porous materials, we can characterize Q*D for both porous and non-porous targets with a wide range of diameters. We analyze the potential influence of porosity on the value of Q*D, and by computing the gravitational phase of the collision in the gravity regime, we characterize the collisional outcome in terms of the fragment size and ejection speed distributions. In the strength regime, which corresponds to target sizes below a few hundreds of meters, we find that porous targets are more difficult to disrupt than non-porous ones. In the gravity regime, one cannot say that non-porous targets are systematically easier or more difficult to disrupt than porous ones, as the outcome also depends on the assumed strengths values. We propose some power-law relationships between Q*D and target's size that can be used in collisional evolution models. The resulting fragment size distributions can be reasonably fitted by a power-law whose exponent ranges between -2.2 and -2.7 for all target diameters in both cases and independently on the impact velocity, at least in the small range investigated between 3 and 5 km/s.
This work was supported by the ESA Advanced Concepts Team (Ariadna contract 20782/07 NEO Encounter 2029). M.J. and W.B. acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation. P.M. acknowledges the support of the French PNP and OPV and from CNRS-JSPS 2008-2009. D.C.R. acknowledges support from the grant NNX08AM39G (NASA).

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