Morphology of Meteorite Surfaces Ablated by High-Power Lasers: Review and Applications

Abstract

Under controlled laboratory conditions, lasers represent a source of energy with well-defined parameters suitable for mimicking phenomena such as ablation, disintegration, and plasma formation processes that take place during the hypervelocity atmospheric entry of meteoroids. Furthermore, lasers have also been proposed for employment in future space exploration and planetary defense in a wide range of potential applications. This highlights the importance of an experimental investigation of lasers’ interaction with real samples of interplanetary matter: meteorite specimens. We summarize the results of numerous meteorite laser ablation experiments performed by several laser sources—a femtosecond Ti:Sapphire laser, the multislab ceramic Yb:YAG Bivoj laser, and the iodine laser known as PALS (Prague Asterix Laser System). The differences in the ablation spots’ morphology and their dependence on the laser parameters are examined via optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and profilometry in the context of the meteorite properties and the physical characteristics of laser-induced plasma.

Simulating asteroid impacts and meteor events by high-power lasers: from the laboratory to spaceborne missions

“…shock expansion of material released from the solid meteorite target (Křivková et al, 2022). The atmospheric entry of a meteoroid does not only result into its sputtering, its fragmentation or ablation (Rogers et al, 2005;Popova, 2006;Vondrak et al, 2008;Silber et al, 2018), or even to meteorite or asteroid impact, if the body is big enough or cohesive (Collins et al, 2005), but also to the random explosion event that has been observed many times for smaller bodies and which are well-known from the case of the Tunguska event in 1908 (Napier and Asher, 2009).…”

“…In the first part, this review summarizes contemporary experimental approaches to studying meteor and impact plasma physics and chemistry. The second part of this paper focuses on recent developments in the application of high power lasers to spaceborne observations of meteors in the Earth's atmosphere (Ferus et al, 2019;Czech Ministry of Transportation, 2021), detection of impacts and atmospheric reprocessing on exoplanets (Ferus et al, 2019;Navarro-González et al, 2019;Navarro et al, 2020;Ferus et al, 2021), space weathering and meteoroid ablative disintegration during atmospheric entry (Kaluna et al, 2017;Křivková et al, 2022).…”