Collisional Formation and Modeling of Asteroid Families

In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this review, we describe numerical simulations of asteroid collisions that reproduced the main properties of families, accounting for both the fragmentation of an asteroid at the time of impact and the subsequent gravitational interactions of the generated fragments. The simulations demonstrate that the catastrophic disruption of bodies larger than a few hundred meters in diameter leads to the formation of large aggregates due to gravitational reaccumulation of smaller fragments, which helps explain the presence of large members within asteroid families. Thus, for the first time, numerical simulations successfully reproduced the sizes and ejection velocities of members of representative families. Moreover, the simulations provide constraints on the family dynamical histories and on the possible internal structure of family members and their parent bodies.Comment: Chapter to appear in the (University of Arizona Press) Space Science Series Book: Asteroids I

Fragment properties at the catastrophic disruption threshold: The effect of the parent body's internal structure

Numerical simulations of asteroid break-ups, including both the fragmentation of the parent body and the gravitational interactions between the fragments, have allowed us to reproduce successfully the main properties of asteroid families formed in different regimes of impact energy, starting from a non-porous parent body. In this paper, using the same approach, we concentrate on a single regime of impact energy, the so-called catastrophic threshold usually designated by Q*D, which results in the escape of half of the target's mass. Thanks to our recent implementation of a model of fragmentation of porous materials, we can characterize Q*D for both porous and non-porous targets with a wide range of diameters. We can then analyze the potential influence of porosity on the value of Q*D, and by computing the gravitational phase of the collision in the gravity regime, we can characterize the collisional outcome in terms of the fragment size and ejection speed distributions, which are the main outcome properties used by collisional models to study the evolutions of the different populations of small bodies. We also check the dependency of Q*D on the impact speed of the projectile. In the strength regime, which corresponds to target sizes below a few hundreds of meters, we find that porous targets are more difficult to disrupt than non-porous ones. In the gravity regime, the outcome is controlled purely by gravity and porosity in the case of porous targets. In the case of non-porous targets, the outcome also depends on strength. We then propose some power-law relationships between Q*D and both target's size and impact speed that can be used in collisional evolution models.Comment: 18 pages, 19 Figures. Accepted for publication in Icaru