Planetary cratering 1. The question of multiple impactor populations: Lunar evidence

— This paper addresses several current issues related to use of craters in interpreting planetary surface histories. The primary goal is to test the widely adopted hypothesis of multiple populations of impactors at different times or places in the Solar System. New data presented here revise a “lunar highland” crater diameter distribution that has been widely used as evidence of an early distinct population of impactors. This curve, which has a depression of the size distribution at mid-sizes, does not, in fact, represent the lunar highlands generally. I show that it is associated with regions of intercrater plains. The more extensive the obliteration by intercrater plains, the deeper the depression. Modeling indicates that the depression of the curve is caused by the obliteration process itself. The oldest, most cratered regions of lunar highlands do not show the depression. These findings call into question earlier interpretations of multiple populations of impactors in the Solar System and of a distinctive primordial population. The present work is consistent, instead, with (1) a relatively uniform size distribution of interplanetary impactors, of mixed origins, back to 4 Ga ago and throughout the sampled Solar System; (2) fragmentation as the process that produced that size distribution; (3) saturation equilibrium on the most heavily cratered surfaces; and (4) differences in structure in the size distribution caused not by distinct impactor populations but by episodes of endogenic obliteration. If accepted, these results would modify some studies of solar system evolution, including assertions of two to five distinct populations of impactors, assumptions of lack of saturation equilibrium, and identifications of specific heliocentric or planetocentric sources for impactors within outer planet satellite systems.