On the Mass Distribution of Fragments of an Asteroid Disrupted in the Earth’s Atmosphere

Irina G Brykina,Lidia A Egorova,Maria Gritsevich

doi:10.1155/2021/9914717

Abstract

To model the interaction with the atmosphere of fragments of a disrupted asteroid, which move independently of each other, it is necessary to know their mass distribution. In this regard, an analogy is drawn with fragmentation in high-speed impact experiments performed to simulate the disruption of asteroids at their collisions in outer space. Based on the results of impact experiments and assuming a power law for the mass distribution in a differential form, we obtained the cumulative number of fragments as a function of the fragment mass m normalized to the total mass of fragments, the mass fraction of the largest fragment(s), the number of the largest fragments, and the power index. The formula for the cumulative number of fragments of a disrupted body is used to describe the results of impact experiments for different fragmentation types. The proposed fragment mass distribution is also tested by comparison with the mass distributions of recovered meteorites in the cases of Mbale, Bassikounou, Almahata Sitta, Košice, and Chelyabinsk meteorite falls.

Highlights

Asteroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere are disrupted under the action of aerodynamic forces, which increase as they penetrate into the denser atmosphere
In [39], different types of core destruction were studied, and it was noted that in the case where the largest core fragment is one order of magnitude larger than the second fragment and there are many small fragments, the distribution curve formed by fragments smaller than or equal to the second one looks like a typical curve of catastrophic disruption and obeys power law mass distribution
E mass distribution of meteorites is compared with calculation by formula (9) shown by the blue line; the value of the power index β is equal to 0.4. e calculation by the formula for the cumulative number of fragments is consistent with the distribution of Mbale meteorites with the exception of the smallest particles

Summary

Introduction

Asteroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere are disrupted under the action of aerodynamic forces, which increase as they penetrate into the denser atmosphere. It was noted that the cumulative mass distribution curve for some fragmentation types is well described by a power law [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42].

Results

Conclusion