Validating Ice Impacts Using Adaptive Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for Planetary Defense

Abstract

Abstract Understanding how a potentially hazardous object (PHO) responds to a kinetic impactor is of great interest to the planetary defense community. Target response depends upon the detailed material properties of the PHO, which may not be well constrained ahead of time. Hence, it is useful to explore a variety of target compositions for kinetic impact deflection. Previous validation efforts have focused primarily on understanding the behavior of common rocky materials, though PHOs are not exclusively composed of such material. Water ice is one material for which there has been only limited code validation against cratering experiments. It is known that comets consist of primarily icy material and some asteroids likely contain some amount of ice. Therefore, it is useful to understand the model sensitivities for ice in deflection simulations. Here we present Adaptive Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations of impacts into water ice by an aluminum projectile. We explore the sensitivities to the damage model within our code and find that the best-fit simulations of ice occur with a Weibull modulus of 12, though results can be obtained with values of the Weibull modulus near the published value of 9.59. This work demonstrates the efficacy of using an adaptive smoothed particle hydrodynamics code to simulate impacts into ice.