Related papers: Impact cratering on Mercury: consequences for the …
During the final stage of planetary formation, different formation pathways of planetary embryos could significantly influence the observed variations in planetary densities. Of the approximately 5,000 exoplanets identified to date, a…
We aim to compute the impact rates for objects with a diameter of 1 km onto the regular satellites of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus using our latest dynamical simulations of the evolution of outer solar system coupled with the best estimates…
Impact bombardment on Mercury in the solar system late accretion phase (ca. 4.4 to 3.8 Ga) caused considerable mechanical, chemical and thermal reworking of its silicate reservoirs (crust and mantle). Depending on the frequency, size and…
We used recently produced Solar System ephemerides, which incorporate two years of ranging observations to the MESSENGER spacecraft, to extract the secular orbital elements for Mercury and associated uncertainties. As Mercury is in a stable…
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments,…
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 classical scenario of terrestrial planet formation is characterized by a phase of giant impacts among Moon-to-Mars mass planetary embryos. While the classic model and its adaptations have produced adequate analogs of the outer three…
Spacecraft measurements of Mercury indicate it has a core dynamo with a surface field of 200-800 nT. These data also indicate that the crust contains remanent magnetization likely produced by an ancient magnetic field. The inferred…
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,…
We analyze radio tracking data obtained during 1311 orbits of the MESSENGER spacecraft in the period March 2011 to April 2014. A least-squares minimization of the residuals between observed and computed values of two-way range and Doppler…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
We consider the observational signatures of giant impacts between planetary embryos. While the debris released in the impact remains in a clump for only a single orbit, there is a much longer lasting asymmetry caused by the fact that all…
We present a comprehensive statistical study of the radial evolution of solar wind turbulence near Mercury's orbit using long-term magnetic field measurements from the MESSENGER mission. Owing to Mercury's highly elliptical orbit and the…
We calculate the expected flux profile of comets into the planetary system from the Oort cloud arising from Galactic tides and encounters with molecular clouds. We find that both periodic and sporadic bombardment episodes, with amplitudes…
The intensity and effects of early impact bombardment on the major satellites of the giant planets during an episode of giant planet migration is still poorly known. We use a combination of dynamical N-body and Monte Carlo simulations to…
We investigated the size distribution of high-inclination main-belt asteroids (MBAs) to explore asteroid collisional evolution under hypervelocity collisions of around 10 km/s. We performed a wide-field survey for high-inclination sub-km…
Model Production Function chronology uses dynamic models of the Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs) and Near Earth Objects (NEOs) to derive the impactor flux to a target body. This is converted into the crater size-frequency-distribution for a…
We simulate the collision of precursor icy moons analogous to Dione and Rhea as a possible origin for Saturn's remarkably young rings. Such an event could have been triggered a few hundred million years ago by resonant instabilities in a…
Impact rates in the first 500 Myr of the solar system are critical to an understanding of lunar geological history, but they have been controversial. The widely accepted, post-Apollo paradigm of early lunar impact cratering (ca. 1975-2014)…