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Simulations of asteroid collisions using a hybrid SPH/N-body approach
Ševeček, Pavel ; Brož, Miroslav (advisor) ; Kobayashi, Hiroshi (referee) ; Schäfer, Christoph M. (referee)
Understanding asteroid collisions is a key part of Solar System science. To in- terpret observations of more than 100 asteroid families, various numerical sim- ulations are used. In this work, we prefer the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), which allows a detailed description of impact mechanics, shock wave propagation, fragmentation of the target, ejection, or reaccumulation controlled by self-gravity and secondary collisions. Since the respective time scale may reach the orbital time scale, the SPH is often complemented by efficient N-body integrators and collisional handlers. In the review part of the thesis, we describe details of numerical methods and their implementation in the new OpenSPH code. We also thoroughly test the code, using analytical solutions and labora- tory experiments as references, and discuss its stability and convergence with respect to spatial resolution. In the refereed papers, included in the thesis, we focus on collisions with targets of particular sizes (D = 10 and 100 km). We explore the dependence of outcomes on the target size, the projectile size, the impact speed, the impact angle, and most importantly, the initial spin rate. We demonstrate that rotation significantly decreases the effective strength of the targets and increases the ejected mass. We self-consistently...
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Hydrodynamic and N-particle simulations of asteroid collisions
Ševeček, Pavel ; Brož, Miroslav (advisor) ; Wünsch, Richard (referee)
We study asteroidal breakups, i.e. fragmentations of targets, subsequent gravitational reaccumulation and formation of small asteroid families. We fo- cused on parent bodies with diameters Dpb = 10 km. Simulations were per- formed with a smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code combined with an efficient N-body integrator. We assumed various projectile sizes, impact veloci- ties and angles (125 runs in total). Resulting size-frequency distributions are sig- nificantly different from results of scaled-down simulations with Dpb = 100 km targets (Durda et al. 2007). We thus derive new parametric relations describing fragment distributions, suitable for Monte-Carlo collisional models. We also characterize velocity fields and angular distributions of fragments, which can be used in N-body simulations of asteroid families. Finally, we discuss several uncertainties related to SPH simulations.
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Rotational dynamics of asteroids affected by thermal emission from topographic features
Ševeček, Pavel ; Brož, Miroslav (advisor) ; Henych, Tomáš (referee)
Infrared radiation emitted from an asteroid surface causes a torque that can significantly affect rotational state of the asteroid. The influence of small topographic features on this phenomenon, called the YORP effect, hasn't been studied yet in detail. In this work, we show that lateral heat diffusion in surface features of suitable sizes leads to the emergence of a local YORP effect which magnitude is comparable to the YORP effect due to the global shape. We solve a three- dimensional heat diffusion equation in a boulder and its surroundings by the finite element method using the FreeFem++ code. The contribution to the total torque is then inferred from the com- puted temperature distribution. We compare the torque for various boulder shapes and material properties. For an idealized boulder our result is consistent with an existing one-dimensional model. Topographic features may cause a spherical asteroid of radius 1 km on a circular orbit at 2.5 AU to undergo a rotational acceleration of about (2.2 ± 1.1) · 10−9 rad/day2 , which corresponds to the spin-up timescale of the order τ = (32 ± 16) Myr. We estimated a size distribution of boulders based on close-up images of (25143) Itokawa surface. Finally, we realized that topographic features of Itokawa can induce a rotational acceleration of the order 10−7...
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