Related papers: Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon and Terrain Age…
Ceres, the dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt, hosts heavily cratered surfaces where craters are continuously eroded mainly due to impact bombardment with a limited influence by non-impact processes. Over continuous bombardment, such…
Metallic bodies that were the cores of differentiated bodies are sources of iron meteorites and are considered to have formed early in the terrestrial planet region before migrating to the main asteroid belt. Surface temperatures and mutual…
The first exploration of Pluto was motivated by (i) the many intriguing aspects of this body, its atmosphere, and its giant impact binary-planet formation; as well as (ii) the scientific desire to initiate the reconnaissance of the…
Existence of subsurface oceans on the satellites of the giant planets and Trans-Neptunian objects has been predicted for some time. Oceans on icy worlds exert a considerable influence on the dynamics of the ice-ocean system and, because of…
Craters formed by the impact of agglomerated materials are commonly observed in nature, such as asteroids colliding with planets and moons. In this paper, we investigate how the projectile spin and cohesion lead to different crater shapes.…
Meteorite craters on the asteroid surface obstruct the horizontal flow of solar wind, forming a plasma wake that modulates the particle fluxes and the electrostatic environment far downstream. In this study, surface charging properties of…
Context. The orbits of the four small moons in the Pluto-Charon system, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, are circumbinary, as the former form a binary dwarf planet. Consequently, the orbit of each one of them is characterized by a number of…
The dwarf planet Pluto is known to host an extended system of five co-planar satellites. Previous studies have explored the formation and evolution of the system in isolation, neglecting perturbative effects by the Sun. Here we show that…
We present a study on the relationship between the ratio of the depth of a crater to its diameter and the diameter for lunar craters both on the maria and on the highlands. We consider craters younger than 1.1 billion years in age, i.e. of…
Almost all meteorite impacts occur at oblique incidence angles, but the effect of impact angle on crater size is not well understood, especially for large craters. To improve oblique impact crater scaling, we present a suite of simulations…
The New Horizons spacecraft provided near global observations of Pluto that far exceed the resolution of Earth-based data sets. Most Pluto New Horizons analysis hitherto has focused on the encounter hemisphere of Pluto (i.e., the antiCharon…
By means of novel volume-diameter aspect ratio diagrams, we ponder on the current conception of crater morphogenesis analyzing crater data from beam explosions, hypervelocity collisions and drop experiments and comparing them with crater…
New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy…
We combine several constraints provided by the crater records on Arrokoth and the worlds of the Pluto system to compute the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of the crater production function for craters with diameter D<10km. For this…
Impact-cratering processes on small bodies are thought to be mainly controlled by the local material strength because of their low surface gravity, and craters that are as large as the parent bodies should be affected by the target…
From recently-acquired, high-resolution images obtained by the Cassini spacecraft, we examine the patterns and spatial distributions of rayed craters on Dione. We identify 29 rayed craters with diameters larger than 2km on Dione's surface.…
Pluto's recently discovered minor moons, Nix and Hydra, have almost circular orbits, and are nearly coplanar with Charon, Pluto's major moon. This is surprising because tidal interactions with Pluto are too weak to damp their…
The goal of this chapter is to review hypotheses for the origin of the Pluto system in light of observational constraints that have been considerably refined over the 85-year interval between the discovery of Pluto and its exploration by…
We present new astrometry of Pluto's three satellites from images taken of the Pluto system during 2002-3 with the High Resolution Camera (HRC) mode of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The…
Vesta has a complex cratering history, with ancient terrains as well as recent large impacts that have led to regional resurfacing. Crater counts can help constrain the relative ages of different units on Vesta's surface, but converting…