Related papers: A colossal impact enriched Mars' mantle with noble…
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…
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…
Mars is likely to be a planetary embryo formed through collisions with planetesimals, which can explain its small mass and rapid formation timescale obtained from 182Hf-182$W chronometry. In the classical theory of planet formation, the…
Intense bombardment of solar system planets in the immediate aftermath of protoplanetary disk dissipation has played a key role in their atmospheric evolution. During this epoch, energetic collisions will have removed significant masses of…
After the formation of the Moon the terrestrial planets were pummelled by impacts from planetesimals left over from terrestrial planet formation. This work attempts to reproduce the impact rates set by modern crater chronologies using…
The Moon is generally thought to have formed from the debris ejected by the impact of a planet-sized object with the proto-Earth towards the end of planetary accretion. Modeling of the impact process predicts that the lunar material was…
Composition of terrestrial planets records planetary accretion, core-mantle and crust-mantle differentiation, and surface processes. Here we compare the compositional models of Earth and Mars to reveal their characteristics and formation…
Isotopic anomalies provide a means of probing the materials responsible for the formation of terrestrial planets. By analyzing new iron isotopic anomaly data from Martian meteorites and drawing insights from published data for O, Ca, Ti,…
Simulations of the moon-forming impact suggest that most of the lunar material derives from the impactor rather than the Earth. Measurements of lunar samples, however, reveal an oxygen isotope composition that is indistinguishable from…
The lunar crater record features $\sim 50$ basins. The radiometric dating of Apollo samples indicates that the Imbrium basin formed relatively late -- from the planet formation perspective -- some $\simeq 3.9$ Ga. Here we develop a…
The concept of Late Veneer has been introduced by the geochemical community to explain the abundance of highly siderophile elements in the Earth's mantle and their chondritic proportions relative to each other. However, in the complex…
The giant planets of our solar system possess envelopes consisting mainly of hydrogen and helium but are also significantly enriched in heavier elements relatively to our Sun. In order to better constrain how these heavy elements have been…
[abridged] In the typical giant-impact scenario for the Moon formation most of the Moon's material originates from the impactor. Any Earth-impactor composition difference should, therefore, correspond to a comparable Earth-Moon composition…
Giant impacts have been suggested to explain various characteristics of terrestrial planets and their moons. However, so far in most models only the immediate effects of the collisions have been considered, while the long-term interior…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
The final stage of terrestrial planet formation consists of the cleanup of residual planetesimals after the giant impact phase. Dynamically, a residual planetesimal population is needed to damp the high eccentricities of the terrestrial…
The Moon is traditionally thought to have coalesced from the debris ejected by a giant impact onto the early Earth. However, such models struggle to explain the similar isotopic compositions of Earth and lunar rocks at the same time as the…
Mars' sedimentary rocks record Gyrs of environmental change. New data enable the first global analysis of paleo-environment relevant physical properties of these rocks, including layer thickness and accumulation rate. We find that layer…
The Moon exhibits striking geological asymmetries in elevation, crustal thickness, and composition between its nearside and farside. Although several scenarios have been proposed to explain these asymmetries, their origin remains debated.…
Recent models of solar system formation suggest that a dynamical instability among the giant planets happened within the first 100 Myr after disk dispersal, perhaps before the Moon-forming impact. As a direct consequence, a bombardment of…