Global Scale Impacts

TL;DR

This paper reviews how global scale impacts affect asteroids, influencing their physical and thermal states, and discusses models to understand their role in planetary formation and evolution.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of impact effects on asteroids and introduces models to interpret their complex impact histories.

Findings

Impacts cause reshaping, heating, and fragmentation of asteroids.

Impact records help understand planet formation processes.

Models simulate impact effects on asteroid evolution.

Abstract

Global scale impacts modify the physical or thermal state of a substantial fraction of a target asteroid. Specific effects include accretion, family formation, reshaping, mixing and layering, shock and frictional heating, fragmentation, material compaction, dilatation, stripping of mantle and crust, and seismic degradation. Deciphering the complicated record of global scale impacts, in asteroids and meteorites, will lead us to understand the original planet-forming process and its resultant populations, and their evolution in time as collisions became faster and fewer. We provide a brief overview of these ideas, and an introduction to models.