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Pulling marbles from a bag: deducing the regional impact history of the spa basin from impact melt rocks
| Content Provider | NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) |
|---|---|
| Author | Cohen, Barbara A. Coker, R. F. |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Description | The South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin is an important target for absolute age-dating. Vertical and lateral impact mixing ensures that regolith within SPA will contain rock fragments from SPA itself, local impact craters, and faraway giant basins. About 20% of the regolith at any given site is foreign [1, 2], but much of this material will be cold ejecta, not impact melt. We calculated the fraction of contributed impact melt using scaling laws to estimate the amount and provenance of impact melt, demonstrating that SPA melt is the dominant impact melt rock (>70%) likely to be present. We also constructed a statistical model to illustrate how many randomly-selected impact-melt fragments would need to be dated, and with what accuracy, to confidently reproduce the impact history of a site. A detailed impact history becomes recognizable after a few hundred to a thousand randomly-selected marbles, however, it will be useful to have more information (e.g. compositional, mineralogical, remote sensing) to group fragments. These exercises show that SPA melt has a high probability of being present in a scoop sample and that dating of a few hundred to a thousand impact-melt fragments will yield the impact history of the SPA basin. |
| File Size | 601511 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_20090033059 |
| Archival Resource Key | ark:/13960/t49p81h93 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher Date | 2009-07-21 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Geophysics Impact Melts Ejecta Structural Basins Lunar Craters Mineralogy Fragments Rocks Time Measurement Chronology Regolith Remote Sensing Ntrs Nasa Technical Reports ServerĀ (ntrs) Nasa Technical Reports Server Aerodynamics Aircraft Aerospace Engineering Aerospace Aeronautic Space Science |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |