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NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) 19970022199: Cometary Nuclei a...
by NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
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Prominent crater chains on Ganymede and Callisto are most
likely the impact scars of comets tidally disrupted by
Jupiter and are not secondary crater chains. We have
examined the morphology of these chains in detail in
order to place constraints on the properties of the
comets that formed them and the disruption process. In
these chains, intercrater spacing varies by no more than
a factor of 2 and the craters within a given chain show
almost no deviation from linearity (although the chains
themselves are on gently curved small circles). All of
these crater chains occur on or very near the Jupiter-
facing hemisphere. For a given chain, the estimated
masses of the fragments that formed each crater vary by
no more than an order of magnitude. The mean fragment
masses for all the chains vary by over four orders of
magnitude (W. B. McKinnon and P. M. Schenk 1995, Geophys.
Res. Lett. 13, 1829-1832), however. The mass of the
parent comet for each crater chain is not correlated with
the number of fragments produced during disruption but is
correlated with the mean mass of the fragments produced
in a given disruption event. Also, the larger fragments
are located near the center of each chain. All of these
characteristics are consistent with those predicted by
disruption simulations based on the rubble pile cometary
nucleus model (in which nuclei are composed on numerous
small fragments weakly bound by self-gravity), and with
those observed in Comet D/Shoemaker-Levy 9. Similar
crater chains have not been found on the other icy
satellites, but the impact record of disrupted comets on
Callisto and Ganymede indicates that disruption events
occur within the Jupiter system roughly once every 200 to
400 years.
Date Published: 2016-10-13 13:56:56
Identifier: NASA_NTRS_Archive_19970022199
Item Size: 41598348
Language: english
Media Type: texts
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