Recovering crater production functions from densely cratered surfaces

Abstract

Two techniques proposed for the recovery of the crater‐production functions on densely cratered surfaces have been appraised. The first technique classifies craters according to their degree of nm preservation, then interprets the statistics of the freshest craters as closely mimicking the full population's production function. Although commonly practiced, in fact, this method is demonstrably misleading for densely cratered surfaces. The second technique uses a weighting scheme to recover the production function. Each crater diameter measured is weighted by the fraction of the crater that remains unoverlapped by subsequent impacts. While this method is theoretically sound even at saturation crater densities, it too fails at high densities due to practical difficulties. For this technique to work effectively, one would have to be able to recognize and accurately measure the diameters of craters having less than 10% of their nms remaining, a feat beyond reasonable expectation.