The Barringer Award Address Presented 1996 July 25, Berlin, Germany: Impact experiments related to the evolution of planetary regoliths

Abstract— Impact‐induced comminution of planetary surfaces is pervasive throughout the solar system and occurs on submillimeter to global scales, resulting in comminution products that range from fine‐grained surface soils, to massive, polymict ejecta deposits, to collisionally fragmented objects. Within this wide range of comminution products, we define regoliths in a narrow sense as materials that were processed by repetitive impacts to dimensional scales comparable to or smaller than that of component minerals of the progenitor rock(s). In this paper, we summarize a wide variety of impact experiments and other observations that were primarily intended to understand the evolution of regoliths on lunar basalt flows, and we discuss some of their implications for asteroidal surfaces.

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