A semi-analytical thermal model for craters with application to the crater-induced YORP effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast semi-analytical thermal model for crater-induced YORP effects on asteroids, accounting for surface features and thermal properties, enabling detailed analysis of asteroid spin evolution.

Contribution

The study develops a semi-analytical model that efficiently computes crater-induced YORP effects, including stochastic impacts, improving upon previous numerical approaches.

Findings

CYORP effect negligible for shallow craters with depth-to-diameter ratio < 0.05

Thermal conductivity influences the CYORP spin component (~0.01)

Surface roughness reduces total YORP torque by tens of percent

Abstract

Context. The YORP effect is the thermal torque generated by radiation from the surface of an asteroid. The effect is sensitive to surface topology, including small-scale roughness, boulders, and craters. Aims: The aim of this paper is to develop a computationally efficient semi-analytical model for the crater-induced YORP (CYORP) effect that can be used to investigate the functional dependence of this effect. Methods. This study obtains the temperature field in a crater over a rotational period in the form of a Fourier series, accounting for the effects of self-sheltering, self-radiation, and self-scattering. Results. We obtain the temperature field of a crater, accounting for the thermal inertia, crater shape, and crater location. We then find that the CYORP effect is negligible when the depth-to-diameter ratio is smaller than 0.05. In this case, it is reasonable to assume a convex shape for YORP calculations. Varying the thermal conductivity yields a consistent value of approximately 0.01 for the spin component of the CYORP coefficient, while the obliquity component is inversely related to thermal inertia, declining from 0.004 in basalt to 0.001 in metal. For a z-axis symmetric shape, the CYORP spin component vanishes, while the obliquity component persists. Our model confirms that the total YORP torque is damped by a few tens of percent by uniformly distributed small-scale surface roughness. Furthermore, for the first time, we calculate the change in the YORP torque at each impact on the surface of an asteroid explicitly and compute the resulting stochastic spin evolution more precisely. Conclusions. The semi-analytical method that we developed, which benefits from fast computation, offers new perspectives for future investigations of the YORP modeling of real asteroids and for the complete rotational and orbital evolution of asteroids accounting for collisions.