Why car about the spin of the moon

Why car about the spin of the moon

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Asteroid impacts are a major force in shaping planetary bodies over the course of their geological history. As such, they receive a great deal of attention and study, often in the form of simulations like the one above. This simulation shows an impact in the Orientale basin of the moon, and if it looks somewhat fluid-like, there’s good reason for that. Impacts like these carry enormous energy, about 97% of which is dissipated as heat. That means temperatures in impact zones can reach 2000 degrees Celsius. The rest of the energy goes into deforming the impacted material. In simulations, those materials – be they rock or exotic ices – are usually modeled as Bingham fluids, a type of non-Newtonian fluid that only deforms after a certain amount of force is applied. An everyday example of such a fluid is toothpaste, which won’t extrude from its tube until you squeeze it.

The fluid dynamical similarities run more than skin-deep, though. For decades, researchers looked for ways to connect asteroid impacts with smaller scale ones, like solid impacts on granular materials or liquid-on-liquid impacts. Recently, though, a group found that liquid-on-granular impacts scale exactly the way that asteroid impacts do. Even the morphology of the craters mirror one another. The reason this works has to do with that energy dissipation mentioned above. As with asteroid impacts, most of the energy from a liquid drop impacting a granular material goes into something other than deforming the crater region. Instead of heat, the mechanism for dissipation here is the drop’s deformation. The results, however, are strikingly alike.

For more on how asteroid impacts affect the moon and other bodies, check out Emily Lakdawalla’s write-up, which also includes lots of amazing sketches by James Tuttle Keane