The cumulation of debris clouds around a fast-rotating asteroid

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Huang, Chenyang, Yu, Yang, Song, Zhijun, Cheng, Bin, Michel, Patrick, Baoyin, Hexi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Huang, Chenyang
Yu, Yang
Song, Zhijun
Cheng, Bin
Michel, Patrick
Baoyin, Hexi
author_facet Huang, Chenyang
Yu, Yang
Song, Zhijun
Cheng, Bin
Michel, Patrick
Baoyin, Hexi
contents The rotational mass loss has been realized to be a prevalent mechanism to produce low-speed debris near the asteroid, and the size composition of the asteroid's surface regolith has been closely measured by in situ explorations. However, the full-scale evolution of the shedding debris has not been examined using the observed particle sizes, which may hold vital clues to the initial growth of an asteroid moonlet, and help us to understand the general mechanisms that dominate the formation of asteroid systems. This paper presented our study on the cumulative evolution of the debris cloud formed by a rotationally unstable asteroid. A semi-analytical model is developed to characterize the spatial-temporal evolution of the debris cloud posterior to a shedding event. Large-scale DEM simulations are performed to quantify the clustering behavior of the debris particles in the mechanical environment near the asteroid. As a result, we found the cumulation of a steady debris cloud is dominated by large pieces of debris, and the shedding particles follow a common migration trend, which fundamentally determines the mass distribution of the debris cloud. For the accretion analysis, we sketched the life cycle of a debris cluster, and showed its dependency on particle size. The DEM simulations adopt physical parameters estimated from observations and asteroid missions. The results confirm porous fluffy cluster structures can form shortly after a shedding event with magnitudes as the observed shedding activities. Measurements to these structures show they possess certain strength and adsorption capacity to collisions from dissociative debris particles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_08436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The cumulation of debris clouds around a fast-rotating asteroid
Huang, Chenyang
Yu, Yang
Song, Zhijun
Cheng, Bin
Michel, Patrick
Baoyin, Hexi
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
The rotational mass loss has been realized to be a prevalent mechanism to produce low-speed debris near the asteroid, and the size composition of the asteroid's surface regolith has been closely measured by in situ explorations. However, the full-scale evolution of the shedding debris has not been examined using the observed particle sizes, which may hold vital clues to the initial growth of an asteroid moonlet, and help us to understand the general mechanisms that dominate the formation of asteroid systems. This paper presented our study on the cumulative evolution of the debris cloud formed by a rotationally unstable asteroid. A semi-analytical model is developed to characterize the spatial-temporal evolution of the debris cloud posterior to a shedding event. Large-scale DEM simulations are performed to quantify the clustering behavior of the debris particles in the mechanical environment near the asteroid. As a result, we found the cumulation of a steady debris cloud is dominated by large pieces of debris, and the shedding particles follow a common migration trend, which fundamentally determines the mass distribution of the debris cloud. For the accretion analysis, we sketched the life cycle of a debris cluster, and showed its dependency on particle size. The DEM simulations adopt physical parameters estimated from observations and asteroid missions. The results confirm porous fluffy cluster structures can form shortly after a shedding event with magnitudes as the observed shedding activities. Measurements to these structures show they possess certain strength and adsorption capacity to collisions from dissociative debris particles.
title The cumulation of debris clouds around a fast-rotating asteroid
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08436