About

As part of my master's thesis, I am studying doublet craters (simultaneous, adjacent impacts of two bodies) on the Dwarf Planet Ceres, using imagery captured by the Dawn spacecraft.  It is my hope that learning more about these impact events can help constrain the frequency, sizes, and orbital characteristics of binary asteroids in the Main Belt.

I look forward to doing similar work using Dawn images of 4 Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the Solar system.

I plan to use this blog to accomplish a few things:
  • Document my scientific journey
  • Share information I find about doublet craters and binary asteroids throughout the Solar system
  • Give myself an additional reason to keep reading articles related to my research
I make no guarantees as to the frequency or regularity of posts... my personal history would indicate that posts will come in bumper harvests separated by fallow periods.

Enjoy!

Paul Wren

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Discerning Secondary Impacts from Primary Ones

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Figure 1: He wrote the book A Fortunate Encounter During the poster session at #LPSC2017, I was surprised and delighted that Jay Melosh stopped to discuss my poster on doublet craters .  Not only had I cited some of his papers in my work, but he also "wrote the book" on Impact Cratering (no, really !). Dr. Melosh was genuinely interested, and also pleased to see that my co-author (and graduate advisor) was Ron Fevig , a former student of his at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at U of A. After examining the images of potential doublets from my survey area, Figure 2: Doublet crater on Ceres he noted that the ones I had identified as "highly eroded" (see figure 2) may not be that eroded, but were possibly secondary craters, since their rims were irregular rather than cleanly circular.  He also referred me to his book for a good description. Refining Crater Identification Criteria Moving into the next phase of my research, I need to be capable of
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More About Secondary Craters

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Figure 1: Copernicus Crater (LROC Image/ASU/NASA) Large impact craters are surrounded by secondary craters, appearing alone, in clusters, in lines, or even in loops. These craters extend to many crater radii from the primary (see Figure 1).  I'm concerned about secondary craters since multiple ejecta projectiles from a large impact could easily strike the surface in proximity to each other simultaneously... looking very much like a doublet crater. Jay Melosh (1989) points out that as the range from the primary crater increases, secondary craters are more dispersed and their shapes are more circular.  The improved circularity of distal secondaries results from the projectile's higher velocity, and the highest velocity ejecta is typically going to travel the furthest. The lower density of secondary craters combined with them being more circular, means they look a lot like primary impact craters! Figure 2:  Secondary craters High-energy ejecta have a decent chance of
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Doublet craters and how they form

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A doublet crater is a pair of impact craters in proximity to one another that are created by the same primary impact event. Doublet craters have been observed on Earth, on the Moon, on Mercury, on Venus, and on Mars. Doublet crater on Ceres. Dawn image FC0054639 ( NASA ) Doublet crater formation. Early research attributed doublet crater formation to a single impactor broken up by either atmospheric disruption or tidal forces, but further analysis revealed that these processes could not result in sufficient separation of the components to create observed doublets. It is now believed that well-separated binary asteroids are the true source of doublet craters. The percentage of impact craters in the inner solar system that are doublets would require ~15% of planet-crossing asteroids to be binaries. This makes doublets an excellent source of evidence for the prevalence of binary asteroidal systems, and can constrain the possible nature and formation processes for such binaries.
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