The Collisional Evolution of the Main Asteroid Belt

The main asteroid belt is a living relic. It contains a record of what happened to the solar system in terms of bombardment since the planet-formation epoch. Ongoing collisional and dynamical evolution processes, however, are slowly obscuring the traces left behind. The goal of modeling efforts is to use all possible observational data to discern the initial conditions and evolution processes that occurred during and after the planet-formation epoch. For example, the questions one can probe with main-belt constraints include the nature and mass of planetesimals inside Jupiter’s orbit, the timing of Jupiter’s formation, the distribution of volatiles in the inner solar system, the size distribution produced during planetary accretion, the presence of planetary embryos inside Jupiter’s orbit, the migration of the giant planets and whether sweeping resonance ever crossed the main belt, the degree of material mixing that occurred between the feeding zones, etc. The problem is that our uncertainties about planet-formation processes and giant planet migration feed back into the assumptions made for our collisional-evolution models of the asteroid belt. If we do not know what happened when, it

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