The cratering record at Uranus: Implications for satellite evolution and the origin of impacting objects

Abstract

The crater size/frequency distributions on the major Uranian satellites show two distinctly different crater populations of different ages. Any hypothesis on the origin of the objects responsible for the period of heavy bombardment must account for the occurrence of different crater populations (size/frequency distributions) in different parts of the solar system. A computerized simulation using short-period comet impact velocities and a modified Holsapple-Schmidt crater scaling law was used to recover the size distribution of cometary nuclei from the observed cratering record. The most likely explanation for the cratering record is that the period of heavy bombardment was caused by different families of accretional remnants indigenous to the system in which the different crater populations occurred