Related papers: Simulating regoliths in microgravity
We perform three-dimensional simulations of a granular jet impact for both frictional and frictionless grains. Small shear stress observed in the experiment[X. Cheng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 188001 (2007) ] is reproduced through our…
The thermal inertia of an asteroid is an indicator of the thermophysical properties of the regolith and is determined by the size of grains on the surface. Previous thermophysical modeling studies of asteroids have identified or suggested…
We investigate the quasi-static mechanical response of soils under cyclic loading using a discrete model of randomly generated convex polygons. This response exhibits a sequence of regimes, each one characterized by a linear accumulation of…
Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are thought to contain a wealth of resources, including water, iron, titanium, nickel, platinum and silicates. Future space missions that can exploit these resources by performing In-Situ Resource Utilization…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
We investigate the onset of irreversibility in a dense granular medium subjected to cyclic shear in a split-bottom geometry. To probe the micro and mesoscale we image bead trajectories in 3D throughout a series of shear strain oscillations.…
Solar system small bodies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, which are achieved following very individual evolutional paths through billions of years. This paper focuses on the reshaping process of rubble-pile asteroids driven by…
Methods to constrain the surface mineralogy of asteroids have seen considerable development during the last decade with advancement in laboratory spectral calibrations and validation of our interpretive methodologies by spacecraft…
Surface shedding of an asteroid is a failure mode where surface materials fly off due to strong centrifugal forces beyond the critical spin period, while the internal structure does not deform significantly. This paper proposes a possible…
Mean motion resonances play a fundamental role in the dynamics of the small bodies of the Solar System. The last decades of the 20th century gave us a detailed description of the dynamics as well as the process of capture of small bodies in…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
Most studies on granular physics have focused on dry granular media, with no liquids between the grains. However, in geology and many real world applications (e.g., food processing, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, civil engineering,…
We study the collapse of pebble clouds with a statistical model to find the internal structure of comet-sized planetesimals. Pebble-pebble collisions occur during the collapse and the outcome of these collisions affect the resulting…
In the late stage of terrestrial planet formation, planets are predicted to undergo pairwise collisions known as giant impacts. Here we present a high-resolution database of giant impacts for differentiated colliding bodies of iron-silicate…
According to Shoemaker, the "impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets", as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been…
Recent experimental results on the static or quasistatic response of granular materials have been interpreted to suggest the inapplicability of the traditional engineering approaches, which are based on elasto-plastic models (which are…
Granular materials have been studied for decades, also driven by industrial and technological applications. These very simple systems, composed by agglomerations of mesoscopic particles, are characterized, in specific regimes, by a large…
The physical composition and structure of meteoroids gives us insight into the formation processes of their parent asteroids and comets. The strength of and fundamental grain sizes in meteoroids tell us about the environment in which small…
We conducted micro-gravity experiments to study the outcome of collisions between sub-mm-sized dust agglomerates consisting of \mu m-sized SiO2 monomer grains at velocities of several cm/s. Prior to the experiments, we used X-ray computer…
We investigate the down-hill creep of a layer of granular material on a slope caused by an oscillatory variation of the size of the particles. The material is modeled as an athermal two dimensional polydisperse system of soft disks under…