Formation of bi-lobed shapes by sub-catastrophic collisions: A late origin of comet 67P/C-G's structure

The origin of the particular shape of a small body like comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) is a topic of active research. How and when it acquired its peculiar characteristics has distinct implications on the origin of the solar system and its dynamics. We investigate how shapes like the one of comet 67P/C-G can result from a new type of low-energy, sub-catastrophic impacts involving elongated, rotating bodies. We focus on parameters potentially leading to bi-lobed structures. We also estimate the probability for such structures to survive subsequent impacts. We use a smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) shock physics code to model the impacts, the subsequent reaccumulation of material and the reconfiguration into a stable final shape. The energy increase as well as the degree of compaction of the resulting bodies are tracked in the simulations. Our modelling results suggest that the formation of bi-lobed structures like 67P/C-G is a natural outcome of the low energy, sub-catastrophic collisions considered here. Sub-catastrophic impacts have the potential to alter the shape of a small body significantly, without leading to major heating or compaction. The currently observed shapes of cometary nuclei, such as 67P/C-G, maybe a result of such a last major shape forming impact.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, accepted pending minor revision

How primordial is the structure of comet 67P/C-G? Combined collisional and dynamical models suggest a late formation

There is an active debate about whether the properties of comets as observed today are primordial or, alternatively, if they are a result of collisional evolution or other processes. We investigate the effects of collisions on a comet with a structure like 67P/C-G. We develop scaling laws for the critical specific impact energies required for a significant shape alteration. These are then used in simulations of the combined dynamical and collisional evolution of comets in order to study the survival probability of a primordially formed object with a shape like 67P/C-G. The effects of impacts on comet 67P/C-G are studied using a SPH shock physics code. The resulting critical specific impact energy defines a minimal projectile size which is used to compute the number of shape-changing collisions in a set of dynamical simulations. These simulations follow the dispersion of the trans-Neptunian disk during the giant planet instability, the formation of a scattered disk, and produce 87 objects that penetrate into the inner solar system with orbits consistent with the observed JFC population. The collisional evolution before the giant planet instability is not considered here. Hence, our study is conservative in its estimation of the number of collisions. We find that in any scenario considered here, comet 67P/C-G would have experienced a significant number of shape-changing collisions, if it formed primordially. This is also the case for generic bi-lobe shapes. Our study also shows that impact heating is very localized and that collisionally processed bodies can still have a high porosity. Our study indicates that the observed bi-lobe structure of comet 67P/C-G may not be primordial, but might have originated in a rather recent event, possibly within the last 1 Gy. This may be the case for any kilometer-sized two-component cometary nuclei.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, accepted pending minor revision

The late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust recorded by eucrites and diogenites as an astrochemical window into the formation of Jupiter and the early evolution of the Solar System

For decades the limited thickness of Vesta's basaltic crust, revealed by the link between the asteroid and the howardite-eucrite-diogenite family of meteorites, and its survival to collisional erosion offered an important constraint for the study of the early evolution of the Solar System. Some results of the Dawn mission, however, cast doubts on our understanding of Vesta's interior composition and of the characteristics of its basaltic crust, weakening this classical constraint. In this work we investigate the late accretion and erosion experienced by Vesta's crust after its differentiation and recorded in the composition of eucrites and diogenites and show that it offers an astrochemical window into the earliest evolution of the Solar System. In our proof-of-concept case study focusing on the late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust during the growth and migration of Jupiter, the water enrichment of eucrites appears to be a sensitive function of Jupiter's migration while the enrichment in highly-siderophile elements of diogenites appears to be particularly sensitive to the size-frequency distribution of the planetesimals. The picture depicted by the enrichments created by late accretion in eucrites and diogenites is not qualitatively affected by the uncertainty on the primordial mass of Vesta. Crustal erosion, instead, is more significantly affected by said uncertainty and Vesta's crust survival appears to be mainly useful to study violent collisional scenarios where highly energetic impacts can strip significant amounts of vestan material while limitedly contributing to Vesta's late accretion. Our results suggest that the astrochemical record of the late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust provided by eucrites and diogenites can be used as a tool to investigate any process or scenario associated to the evolution of primordial Vesta and of the early Solar System.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication on Icaru

The joint project on Vertisols management retrospect and prospects

The Joint Vertisol Project which, by its nature and intention has dealt with natural resource research and development, has inherently addressed the complexity of factors and interactions among them. This has led to the two dimension strategy of choice or prioritisation: 1) issues related to research of the high-rainfall, low temperature and thus highly waterlogged Vertisols of the Ethiopian highlands, thereby providing a common denominator to collaborators for subsequent stages of research and development activities; and 2) high disciplinary priority to soil management related research; waterlogging and soil fertility being the most important constraints for Vertisols use high rainfall areas. Interinstitutional effort was therefore designed involving those in charge of training, research, development and extension. This would ensure more or less simulataneous design of both Vertisol - related management technologies and effective validation and transfer mechanisms commensurate with the constraints and opportunities of target farming systems. Seven years after its initiation, the Joint Vertisol Project has acquired a wealth of experiences which provide important lessons for future direction of its own programme and for similar activities elsewhere

Hydrothermal Variations and Physio-Osmotic Conditioning E.ects on Five African Millet Varieties during Short Term Substrate Desiccation

Environmental factors di.erentially a.ect the germination of millet (Pennisetum americanum L.) and impact both the rate and extent of .eld emergence. The extent and uniformity of emergence depends on hydrothermal variations in both soil moisture and temperature levels. To determine the impact of these two factors and counteracting physiological and osmotic conditioning seed treatments, two growth chamber trials were conducted on African millet. Five genotypes responded to di.erences in temperature or osmotic seed conditioning. Seed conditioning with GA3, Kinetin, NaCl and KNO3 was tested. Increasing incubation temperature decreased the final proportion of seeds germinating and slowed germination for each of the five genotypes tested when exceeding a 29°C threshold. GA3 improved the performance of seed lots, while physio-osmotic conditioning and temperature interacted to affect the proportion of germinating millet seeds. These germination tests partially explain interspecific differences in the impact of timing of heat fluctuations in the field. Patterns of millet germination in response to temperature and rainfall fluctuations could be explained by its response to seed conditioning, temperature or moisture levels

Semantic 3D scene interpretation: A framework combining optimal neighborhood size selection with relevant features

3D scene analysis by automatically assigning 3D points a semantic label has become an issue of major interest in recent years. Whereas the tasks of feature extraction and classification have been in the focus of research, the idea of using only relevant and more distinctive features extracted from optimal 3D neighborhoods has only rarely been addressed in 3D lidar data processing. In this paper, we focus on the interleaved issue of extracting relevant, but not redundant features and increasing their distinctiveness by considering the respective optimal 3D neighborhood of each individual 3D point. We present a new, fully automatic and versatile framework consisting of four successive steps: (i) optimal neighborhood size selection, (ii) feature extraction, (iii) feature selection, and (iv) classification. In a detailed evaluation which involves 5 different neighborhood definitions, 21 features, 6 approaches for feature subset selection and 2 different classifiers, we demonstrate that optimal neighborhoods for individual 3D points significantly improve the results of scene interpretation and that the selection of adequate feature subsets may even further increase the quality of the derived results

Numerical simulations of impacts involving porous bodies: I. Implementing sub-resolution porosity in a 3D SPH Hydrocode

In this paper, we extend our Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) impact code to include the effect of porosity at a sub-resolution scale by adapting the so-called $P-alpha$ model. Many small bodies in the different populations of asteroids and comets are believed to contain a high degree of porosity and the determination of both their collisional evolution and the outcome of their disruption requires that the effect of porosity is taken into account in the computation of those processes. Here, we present our model and show how porosity interfaces with the elastic-perfectly plastic material description and the brittle fracture model generally used to simulate the fragmentation of non-porous rocky bodies. We investigate various compaction models and discuss their suitability to simulate the compaction of (highly) porous material. Then, we perform simple test cases where we compare results of the simulations to the theoretical solutions. We also present a Deep Impact-like simulation to show the effect of porosity on the outcome of an impact. Detailed validation tests will be presented in a next paper by comparison with high-velocity laboratory experiments on porous materials (Jutzi et al., in preparation). Once validated at small scales, our new impact code can then be used at larger scales to study impacts and collisions involving brittle solids including porosity, such as the parent bodies of C-type asteroid families or cometary materials, both in the strength- and in the gravity-dominated regime.Comment: Accepted for publication in Icarus; 60 pages, 13 figure

Classification of airborne laser scanning data using geometric multi-scale features and different neighbourhood types

In this paper, we address the classification of airborne laser scanning data. We present a novel methodology relying on the use of complementary types of geometric features extracted from multiple local neighbourhoods of different scale and type. To demonstrate the performance of our methodology, we present results of a detailed evaluation on a standard benchmark dataset and we show that the consideration of multi-scale, multi-type neighbourhoods as the basis for feature extraction leads to improved classification results in comparison to single-scale neighbourhoods as well as in comparison to multi-scale neighbourhoods of the same type