Sand Creep Motion in Slow Spin-up Experiment: An Analogue of Regolith Migration on Asteroids

TL;DR

This study uses a slow spin-up experiment with granular sand to simulate and analyze regolith migration on asteroid surfaces, revealing behaviors similar to natural asteroid evolution under YORP acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a laboratory analogue experiment to study asteroid regolith migration, linking granular creep behavior to asteroid surface evolution.

Findings

Sand surface approaches criticality during spin-up.

Creep motion exhibits intermittency similar to sheared granular systems.

Experimental results align with numerical simulations of asteroid regolith evolution.

Abstract

We studied the creep motion of granular materials in a gradient potential field that is created using a slow spin-up experiment device. Natural sand confined in the acrylic box is spun up by a controlled turntable and the surface flows are captured using video-based measurements. Various spin-up accelerations were considered to understand the responses of creep motion on different accelerating paths. Convergent behaviors in the morphological change of sand surface were observed in the final steady state. To quantify the quasi-static spin-up process, we examined the net flux and the surface slope as a function of the spin rate and offset from the rotation axis. Evolution of sand creep motion demonstrated behaviors similar to regolith migration in numeric simulations, showing intermittency like general sheared granular systems. We noticed the sand surface approaches criticality as the spin-up proceeding, consistent with the observation that top-shaped asteroids near limiting spin rate take on critical shape. Comparisons to large-scale numeric simulations and analytical solutions reveal underlying similarities between our experiments and the million-year evolution of asteroid regolith under YORP acceleration, which raises the possibility of studying asteroid surface processes in laboratory analogue experiments.