Small crater populations on Vesta
S. Marchi (1-2), W.F. Bottke (1), D.P. O'Brien (3), P. Schenk (4), S., Mottola (5), M.C. De Sanctis (6), D.A. Kring (2), D.A. Williams (7), C.A., Raymond (8), C.T. Russell (9) ((1) NLSI-SwRI, Boulder, CO, (2) NLSI-LPI,, Houston, TX, (3) PSI, Tucson, AZ, (4) LPI, Houston, TX

TL;DR
This study analyzes small crater populations on Vesta to infer properties of main belt asteroids, finding their size distribution aligns with models and suggesting a steady state population over billions of years.
Contribution
It provides the first detailed analysis of small crater SFDs on Vesta, linking crater data to asteroid population models and their long-term stability.
Findings
Small crater SFDs match collisional models down to ~10 m projectiles.
Impactor SFD shape has remained consistent over billions of years.
Main belt asteroid population has been roughly constant within a factor of 2.
Abstract
The NASA Dawn mission has extensively examined the surface of asteroid Vesta, the second most massive body in the main belt. The high quality of the gathered data provides us with an unique opportunity to determine the surface and internal properties of one of the most important and intriguing main belt asteroids (MBAs). In this paper, we focus on the size frequency distributions (SFDs) of sub-kilometer impact craters observed at high spatial resolution on several selected young terrains on Vesta. These small crater populations offer an excellent opportunity to determine the nature of their asteroidal precursors (namely MBAs) at sizes that are not directly observable from ground-based telescopes (i.e., below ~100 m diameter). Moreover, unlike many other MBA surfaces observed by spacecraft thus far, the young terrains examined had crater spatial densities that were far from empirical…
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