A Comparison of Meteoritic Shock Data with Currently Available Equations of State, With Applications to Impact Hazard Mitigation

Abstract:

Material-specific equations of state (EOS) are required for numerical models of small body impacts and collisions. Current models approximate meteoritic and cometary materials using Earth-analogue EOS's, e.g., quartz, dunite, hydrated tuff, water ice, and numerical convolutions of analog EOS's. Earth-analogues are used because the formulation of a comprehensive equation of state requires a large amount of experimental data that is often expensive to obtain and destructive to the available samples. Analogue EOS's can, however, perform very differently from the original material under shock loading. Here we compare the sparse available shock data for meteoritic materials to frequently used analogue EOS's (some of which are unexpectedly sparse themselves) to explore the capabilities and limitations of these models.