Related papers: An experimental study of low-velocity impacts into…
This work presents an experimental design for studying low-velocity collisions into granular surfaces in low-gravity. In the experiment apparatus, reduced-gravity is simulated by releasing a free-falling projectile into a surface container…
Spin off events and impacts can eject boulders from an asteroid surface and rubble pile asteroids can accumulate from debris following a collision between large asteroids. These processes produce a population of gravitational bound objects…
The dusty regolith covering the surfaces of asteroids and planetary satellites differs in size, shape, and composition from terrestrial soil particles and is subject to very different environmental conditions. Experimental studies of the…
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…
Collisions between centimeter- to decimeter-sized dusty bodies are important to understand the mechanisms leading to the formation of planetesimals. We thus performed laboratory experiments to study the collisional behavior of dust…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…
This study is carried out in the framework of sample-return missions to asteroids that use a low-speed projectile as the primary component of its sampling mechanism (e.g., JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions). We perform numerical…
We performed micro-gravity collision experiments in our laboratory drop-tower using 5-cm-sized dust agglomerates with volume filling factors of 0.3 and 0.4, respectively. This work is an extension of our previous experiments reported in…
In this paper we use a Soft-Sphere Discrete Element method code to simulate the transmission and study the attenuation of a seismic wave. Then, we apply our findings to the different space missions that have had to touch the surface of…
Analyses of impact provide rich insights from the evolution of granular bodies to their structural properties of the surface and subsurface layers of celestial bodies. Although chemical cohesive bonding has been observed in asteroid…
The impact-induced energy transfer and dissipation in granular targets without any confining walls are studied by microgravity experiments. A solid projectile impacts into a granular target at low impact speed ($0.045 \leq v_p \leq…
In this paper we present results of two novel experimental methods to investigate the collisional behavior of individual macroscopic icy bodies. The experiments reported here were conducted in the microgravity environments of parabolic…
We examine ejecta generated by ultra low velocity impacts under asteroid conditions. In an environment of precisely controlled milligravity and under vacuum, impacts with velocities in the range of centimeters/second are performed with…
Experiments on the low-speed impact of solid objects into granular media have been used both to mimic geophysical events and to probe the unusual nature of the granular state of matter. Observations have been interpreted in terms of…
Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…
In situ observations of small asteroids show that surfaces covered by boulders and coarse terrain are frequent on such bodies. Regolith grain sizes have distributions on approximately mm and cm scales, and the behavior of such large grains…
We detail a platform for partial g environment and an experiment for simulated impacts on asteroid surfaces based on it. The partial g environment is created by a two stage approach: First, create microgravity using the ZARM drop tower.…
To gain a better understanding of the surfaces of planets and small bodies in the solar system, the flow behavior of granular material for various gravity levels is of utmost interest. We performed a set of reduced-gravity measurements to…
The drag force exerted on an object intruding into granular media can depend on the object's velocity as well as the depth penetrated. We report on intrusion experiments at constant speed over four orders in magnitude together with…
Material deformation and failure under impact loading is a subject of active investigation in space science and often requires very specialized equipment for testing. In this work, we present the design, operational analysis and application…