Related papers: Mercurian impact ejecta: Meterorites and mantle

The origin of Mercury's high iron-to-rock ratio is still unknown. In this work we investigate Mercury's formation via giant impacts and consider the possibilities of a single giant impact, a hit-and-run, and multiple collisions in one…

The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…

The motion of bodies ejected from the Earth was studied, and the probabilities of collisions of such bodies with the present terrestrial planets were calculated. The dependences of these probabilities on velocities, angles and points of…

This paper presents a quantitative study of the evolution of the ejecta cloud released from a hypervelocity impact on a binary asteroid. We performed numerical simulations of the post-impact dynamics of the ejecta cloud in the framework of…

Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…

Potential microbial contamination of Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, which can be brought about by transportation of Mars ejecta produced by meteoroid impacts on the Martian surface, has been comprehensively assessed in a statistical…

Observations and meteorites indicate that the Martian materials are enigmatically distributed within the inner solar system. A mega impact on Mars creating a Martian hemispheric dichotomy and the Martian moons can potentially eject Martian…

MESSENGER observations suggest a magma ocean formed on proto-Mercury, during which evaporation of metals and outgassing of C- and H-bearing volatiles produced an early atmosphere. Atmospheric escape subsequently occurred by plasma heating,…

Radar and spacecraft observations show the permanently shadowed regions around Mercury's North Pole to contain water ice and complex organic material. One possible source of this material are impacts by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs),…

The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed by an impact between the Earth and an impactor around 4.5 billion years ago. This impact could have been so energetic that it could have mixed and homogenized the Earth's mantle. However, this view…

All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…

The Earth, Venus, Mars, and some extrasolar terrestrial planets have a mass and radius that is consistent with a mass fraction of about 30% metallic core and 70% silicate mantle. At the inner frontier of the solar system, Mercury has a…

The probability is investigated that the meteorites originating on Earth are transferred to other planets in our Solar System and to extra solar planets. We take the collisional Chicxulub crater event, and material that was ejected as an…

Large impacts onto young rocky planets may transform their compositions, creating highly reducing conditions at their surfaces and reintroducing highly siderophile metals to their mantles. Key to these processes is the availability of an…

To characterize the meteoroid environment around Mercury and its contribution to the planet's exosphere, we combined four distinctive sources of meteoroids in the solar system: main-belt asteroids, Jupiter family comets, Halley-type comets,…

In protoplanetary disks, dust grains rich in metallic iron can attract each other magnetically. If they are magnetized to values near saturation, the magnetically induced collision speeds are high enough to knock off the non-magnetized,…

Hypervelocity ejection of material by impact spallation is considered a plausible mechanism for material exchange between two planetary bodies. We have modeled the spallation process during vertical impacts over a range of impact velocities…

The pathway to forming the iron-rich planet Mercury remains mysterious. Mercury's core makes up 70% of the planetary mass, which implies a significant enrichment of iron relative to silicates, while its mantle is strongly depleted in…

Mercury's core mass fraction (CMF) is ~0.7, more than double that of the other rocky planets in the solar system, which have CMFs of ~0.3. The origin of Mercury's large, iron-rich core remains unknown. Adding to this mystery, an elusive…

Granular material that is bound by the low gravity of a small asteroid is mobilized by slow velocity impacts. These splashes generated by impacts might play an important role in sculpting the asteroid's surface. In laboratory experiments we…