A Reevaluation of Impact Melt Production

The production of melt and vapor is an important process in impact cratering events. Because significant melting and vaporization do not occur in impacts at velocities currently achievable in the laboratory, a detailed study of the production of melt and vapor in planetary impact events is carried out with hydrocode simulations. Sandia's two-dimensional axisymmetric hydrocode CSQ was used to estimate the amount of melt and vapor produced for widely varying initial conditions: 10 to 80 km/sec for impact velocity, 0.2 to 10 km for the projectile radius. Runs with different materials demonstrate the material dependency of the final result. These results should apply to any size projectile (for given impact velocity and material), since the results can be dynamically scaled so long as gravity is unimportant in affecting the early-time flow. In contrast with the assumptions of previous analytical models, a clear difference in shape, impact-size dependence, and depth of burial has been found between the melt regions and the isobaric core. In particular, the depth of the isobaric core is not a good representation of the depth of the melt regions, which form deeper in the target. While near-surface effects cause the computed melt region shapes to look like “squashed spheres” the spherical shape is still a good analytical analog. One of the goals of melt production studies is to find proper scaling laws to infer melt production for any impact event of interest. We tested the point source limit scaling law for melt volumes (μ = 0.55–0.6) proposed by M. D. Bjorkman and K. A. Holsapple (1987,Int. J. Impact Eng.5, 155–163). Our results indicate that the point source limit concept does not apply to melt and vapor production. Rather, melt and vapor production follows an energy scaling law (μ = 0.67), in good agreement with previous results of T. J. Ahrens and J. D. O'Keefe [1977, inImpact and Explosion Cratering(D. J. Roddy, R. O. Pepin, and R. B. Merrill, Eds.), pp. 639–656, Pergamon Press, Elmsford, NY]. Finally we tested the accuracy of our melt production calculation against a terrestrial dataset compiled by R. A. F. Grieve and M. J. Cintala (1992,Meteorities27, 526–538). The hydrocode melt volumes are in good agreement with the estimated volumes of that set of terrestrial craters on crystalline basements. At present there is no good model for melt production from impact craters on sedimentary targets.

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