Cohesive Regolith on Fast Rotating Asteroids

TL;DR

This study combines theoretical and simulation models to analyze how cohesive regolith on fast-spinning asteroids migrates and fails, revealing regions of loss and stability that depend on spin rate and cohesion.

Contribution

It introduces a scaling law to predict regolith retention on asteroids based on their spin rate and cohesion properties, advancing understanding of surface evolution.

Findings

Regolith loss occurs at mid-latitudes with low cohesion.

Failure shifts to equator as cohesion increases.

High-latitude regions remain stable at high spin rates.

Abstract

The migration of cohesive regolith on the surface of an otherwise monolithic or strong asteroid is studied using theoretical and simulation models. The theory and simulations show that under an increasing spin rate (such as due to the YORP effect), the regolith covering is preferentially lost across certain regions of the body. For regolith with little or no cohesive strength, failure occurs by landsliding from the mid latitudes of the body at high enough spin rates. As the cohesive strength of the regolith increases, failure occurs by fission of grains (or coherent chunks of grains) across a greater extent of latitudes and eventually will first occur at the equator. As the spin rate is further increased, failure regions migrate from the first failure point to higher and lower latitudes. Eventually failure will encompass the equatorial region, however there always remains a region of high latitudes (around the poles) that will not undergo failure for arbitrarily high spin rates (unless disturbed by some other phenomenon). With these results a scaling law is derived that can be used to determine whether observed asteroids could retain surface regolith grains of a given size. The implications of this for the interpretation of spectral observations of small asteroids and boulder migration on large asteroids are discussed.