Fragment properties from large-scale asteroid collisions: I: Results from SPH/N-body simulations using porous parent bodies and improved material models

TL;DR

This study uses advanced SPH/N-body simulations to analyze how porous asteroid-like bodies break apart and reaccumulate, revealing the influence of porosity and size on fragment distributions, which informs small-body evolution models.

Contribution

It introduces improved material models and pore-crushing effects in simulations, providing new insights into the impact strength and fragment size distributions of porous parent bodies.

Findings

Porous targets have higher impact strength than previous rubble-pile models.

Fragment size distributions depend strongly on impact energy and size scale.

Porous bodies behave more like monolithic targets than rubble-piles.

Abstract

Understanding the collisional fragmentation and subsequent reaccumulation of fragments is crucial for studies of the formation and evolution of the small-body populations. Using an SPH / N-body approach, we investigate the size-frequency distributions (SFDs) resulting from the disruption of 100 km-diameter targets consisting of porous material, including the effects of pore-crushing as well as friction. Overall, the porous targets have a significantly higher impact strength (Q*D) than the rubble-pile parent bodies investigated previously (Benavidez et al., 2012) and show a behavior more similar to non-porous monolithic targets (Durda et al., 2007). Our results also confirm that for a given specific impact energy, the SFDs resulting from a parent body disruption are strongly dependent on the size scale.