Regolith flow on top-shaped asteroids

Banik, Deepayan; Kumar, Ghanendra; Sharma, Ishan

doi:10.1098/rspa.2021.0972

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 84 publications

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“…At the same time, [8] report that surface material failure is generally initiated by YORP-driven spin up, leading us to contend that YORP is unlikely to have resurfaced a slow spinner like Itokawa. Separately, we note that YORP is extremely sensitive to topography, with minor changes causing major deviations, even changes in spin direction [15]. Including YORP in any resurfacing model thus requires closely following the surface’s evolution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segregation on small rubble bodies due to impact-induced seismic shaking

Ghosh,

Sharma,

Dhingra

2024

Proc. R. Soc. A.

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We present a framework to study regolith segregation on rubble-pile asteroids—self-gravitating granular aggregates—due to seismic shaking induced by impacts sustained during their lifetimes. We first relate the amplitude and frequency of surface vibrations to the location and severity of an impact, and the rubble body’s geometry and bulk properties. For illustration, the body is taken to be an ellipsoid with size and spin close to that of Itokawa, although more complex asteroid shapes may be incorporated. We then model the body’s collisional history stochastically given the variability in the impact activity on an asteroid. Finally, we use discrete element simulations to investigate the regolith’s response to impacts. In these simulations, in any sample collisional history, every time an impact occurs, a bin filled with a grain mixture and located at the region of interest on the asteroid is vibrated at that impact’s associated amplitude and frequency. Using this framework, we find that impact-driven seismicity is sufficient to drive size segregation on small rubble-piles, but the segregation quality depends on several aspects, e.g. total impact energy supplied, placement of the region of interest, bulk wave speed and seismic diffusivity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segregation on small rubble bodies due to impact-induced seismic shaking

Ghosh,

Sharma,

Dhingra

2024

Proc. R. Soc. A.

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An integrated DEM code for tracing the entire regolith mass movement on asteroids

Song,

Yu,

Soldini

et al. 2024

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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This paper presents a general strategy for tracking the scale-span movement process of asteroid regolith materials. It achieves the tracking of the mass movement on the asteroid at a realistic scale, under conditions of high-resolution asteroid surface topography (submeter level) and actual regolith particle sizes. To overcome the memory exponential expansion caused by the enlarged computational domain, we improved the conventional cell-linked list method so that it can be applied to arbitrarily large computational domains around asteroids. An efficient contact detection algorithm for particles and polyhedral shape models of asteroids is presented, which avoids traversing all surface triangles and thus allows us to model high-resolution surface topography. A parallel algorithm based on Compute Unified Device Architecture for the gravitational field of the asteroid is presented. Leveraging heterogeneous computing features, further architectural optimization overlaps computations of the long-range and short-range interactions, resulting in an approaching doubling of computational efficiency compared to the code lacking architectural optimizations. Using the above strategy, a specific high-fidelity discrete element method code that integrates key mechanical models, including the irregular gravitational field, the interparticle and particle-surface interactions, and the coupled dynamics between the particles and the asteroid, is developed to track the asteroid regolith mass movement. As tests, we simulated the landslide of a sand pile on the asteroid’s surface during spin-up. The simulation results demonstrate that the code can track the mass movement of the regolith particles on the surface of the asteroid from local landslides to mass leakage with good accuracy.

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Regolith flow on top-shaped asteroids

Cited by 2 publications

References 84 publications

Segregation on small rubble bodies due to impact-induced seismic shaking

Segregation on small rubble bodies due to impact-induced seismic shaking

An integrated DEM code for tracing the entire regolith mass movement on asteroids

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