Threat from Rubble-Pile Asteroids

Abstract:

While chondrites are the most common meteoroids to enter our atmosphere, they represent a small fraction of recovered falls. Most stony meteorites disrupt during entry, consumed by ablation or lost by weathering; in contrast, small iron meteorites (<10 m) disrupt and disperse to create strewnfields due to interacting atmospheric bow shocks [e.g., Passey and Melosh, 1980]. The Carancas impact crater in 2007, however, challenged our understanding [Tancredi et al., 2008]: (a) first eyewitness of a crater formed by a stony meteorite; (b) undetected thermal entry at altitude; (c) no accessory meteorite falls; (d) “explosion” (not low-speed compression) crater; (e) infrasound/seismic data indicating a high-speed entry/collision; and (f) petrologic evidence for shock deformation/melting in breccias indicative of speeds >4 km/s. Although a monolithic chondrite (~ 10 m across) might allow surviving entry, most objects of this size contain multiple flaws, ensuring atmospheric disruption. Hence, an alternative “needle model” was proposed wherein a small rubble-pile object gradually re-shaped itself during entry [Schultz, 2008], a process that minimizes drag, thermal signatures of entry, and catastrophic disruption. First proposed to account for smaller than expected craters on Venus [Schultz, 1992], such a process resembles subsequent Shoemaker-Levy entry models [Boslough and Crawford, 1997] that predicted much deeper entry than standard models.

Laboratory experiments at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range simulated this process by breaking-up hypervelocity projectiles into a cloud of debris and tracking its path at near-full atmospheric pressure. The resulting cloud of fragments exhibited less deceleration than a solid sphere at the same speed. Moreover, shadowgraphs revealed constituent fragments “surfing” the pressure jump within the mach cone/column. Previous models proposed that crater-forming impacts must be >50-100 m in diameter in order to survive entry [Bland and Artemieva, 2004]. The “needle model” for the Carancas meteorite entry, however, raises questions about this lower limit for threats by rubble-pile asteroids, e.g., Itokawa. Consequently, we modeled the fate of a rubble-pile entering earth’s atmosphere using GEODYN, an Eulerian code with adaptive mesh refinement (Antoun et al., 2001).