Fragment properties at the catastrophic disruption threshold: The effect of the parent body's internal structure

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to analyze how the internal structure, porosity, and impact speed of asteroids influence the catastrophic disruption threshold and fragment properties, enhancing understanding of asteroid family formation.

Contribution

It introduces a model for fragmentation of porous materials and characterizes Q*D for porous and non-porous targets across size ranges, including effects of impact speed.

Findings

Porous targets are more resistant to disruption in the strength regime.

In the gravity regime, porosity significantly influences collision outcomes.

Power-law relationships between Q*D, size, and impact speed are proposed.

Abstract

Numerical simulations of asteroid break-ups, including both the fragmentation of the parent body and the gravitational interactions between the fragments, have allowed us to reproduce successfully the main properties of asteroid families formed in different regimes of impact energy, starting from a non-porous parent body. In this paper, using the same approach, we concentrate on a single regime of impact energy, the so-called catastrophic threshold usually designated by 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 can then 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 can characterize the collisional outcome in terms of the fragment size and ejection speed distributions, which are the main outcome properties used by collisional models to study the evolutions of the different populations of small bodies. We also check the dependency of Q*D on the impact speed of the projectile. 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, the outcome is controlled purely by gravity and porosity in the case of porous targets. In the case of non-porous targets, the outcome also depends on strength. We then propose some power-law relationships between Q*D and both target's size and impact speed that can be used in collisional evolution models.