SpaceLab, an N-Body Particle-Particle Ballistic Collision Simulation Tool with Applications in Celestial Body Dynamics

Abstract

This thesis conveys the key technical features and scientific applications of a particle-particle ballistic simulation tool (SpaceLab) as well as a high level overview of experiments it was designed for and executed on. SpaceLab simulates spherical particle interactions under any combination of self-gravity, sliding friction, rolling friction, Van-Der-Waals (VDW) cohesion force, elastic repulsion, and restitution. SpaceLab particle interactions are never instantaneous and ensure sufficient interaction time between particles to conserve energy not lost to restitution to within 1\% per collision. SpaceLab has been used to explore both the gravity dominated and VDW dominated scales, including hundreds of kilometer rubble-pile asteroids and micron sized dust grains comprised of up to 10,000 particles with desired material properties, size variation, and control over a wide range of initial conditions. High velocity projectiles are also facilitated with dynamic time-stepping to accurately simulate scenarios like the DART mission. Conglomerate objects and both scales are tested for resilience to collisions with various sized projectiles, speeds, and spins to define constraints for collision remnant growth. The data gained from these experiments may be used to determine what conditions facilitate the growth of asteroids into planets, or dust grains into larger objects significantly effected by gravity. We also verify that the tool's results agree with similar work in literature and attribute key differences to features we include that are still uncommon in the field, such as the inclusion of surface friction which we find to increase collision remnant bound mass due to increase dissipation of collision energy. Future development plans for performance improvement and user friendly interface are also briefly discussed. Figure \ref{fig:gum} shows a typical off-center collision of two clusters of particles which may be used to model rubble-pile asteroid collisions. These figures demonstrate a common scenario simulated with SpaceLab

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