Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Planetary and Space Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pss

The shapes of fragments from catastrophic disruption events: Effects

of target shape and impact speed
Daniel D. Durda a,n, Adriano Campo Bagatin a,b,c, Rafael A. Alema b,c, George J. Flynn d,
Melissa M. Strait e, Angela N. Clayton e, Emma B. Patmore e
a

Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 300, Boulder, CO 80302, United States
Departamento de Fsica, Ingeniera de Sistemas y Teora de la Seal, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain
c
Instituto de Fsica Aplicada a las Ciencias y la Tecnologa, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain
d
SUNY-Plattsburgh, 101 Broad St, Plattsburgh, NY 12901, United States
e
Alma College, Alma, MI 48801, United States
b

art ic l e i nf o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 30 April 2014
Received in revised form
3 October 2014
Accepted 8 October 2014
Available online 18 October 2014

We conducted impact experiments at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range in the context of an ongoing
set of experiments to investigate both target shape and impact speed effects on fragment shapes and
massfrequency distributions in collisions on basalt targets. In this work we present the rst part of that
set, regarding mostly target shape effects. We impacted both irregularly-shaped and spherical basalt
targets at speeds ranging from
46 km/s. We obtained massfrequency distributions from fragments
recovered from the impact chamber and measured fragments shapes using a combination of image
analysis and manual measurements with a caliper. We nd that the characteristics of the mass
frequency distributions and the range of fragment shapes show no signicant dependence on target
shape (i.e., at, shell-like fragments are produced in impacts into irregularly-shaped targets as well as
spherical ones). We note that many thin, plate-like impact fragments seem to originate from lowerspeed impacts and can originate from the interior of the targets (in addition to the attened fragments
often seen to origin from the near-surface spall zone in cratering impacts). We measure the porosity of
aggregates made by articially (but randomly) reassembling fragments from each impact to be on the
order of 50%, signicantly larger than that for hexagonal lattice and random packing of equal sized spheres.
& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Asteroids
Fragmentation
Collisions
Internal structure
Gravitational aggregates

1. Introduction
Recent experiments showing onion shells of tabular-shaped
fragments from impacts into spherical targets (Walker et al., 2013;
Nakamura, 2014 personal communication) have re-opened the question of the fracture mechanics responsible for determining fragment
shape in catastrophic impacts. Fujiwara et al. (1978) presented the rst
work on the topic of shapes of fragments from impact experiments in
the context of asteroid studies. Fujiwara et al. (1989) suggest two
modes of catastrophic disruption for targets in laboratory impact
experiments: (1) core-type fragmentation in the high-speed, highenergy-density regime; and (2) cone-type fragmentation in the lowspeed, low-energy-density regime. These effects appear to be scale
invariant, at least over the range of cm to m-scale target sizes
investigated in laboratory impact experiments conducted to date.
Fig. 1a, for example, shows the result of one of the cratering impacts
into 1-m-diameter granite spheres reported in Walker et al. (2013). In

Correspondence author.
E-mail address: durda@boulder.swri.edu (D.D. Durda).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2014.10.006
0032-0633/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

these experiments aluminum spheres of 4.45-cm diameter were

impacted into the granite targets at speeds of 2 km/s. Many of the
larger fragments recovered from the experiment enclosure exhibited
thin, tabular shapes and the fractured walls of the resulting spall
craters displayed the same plate-like nature of the many fragments
peeled off the outer shell of the granite onion. Very similar fragment
morphology is seen at smaller scales as wellFig. 1b shows the largest
remnant of an impact into a 5-cm-diameter soda lime glass sphere at
2 km/s, exhibiting the same attened, tabular-shaped fragmentation
pattern in the near-surface spall zone (Nakamura, 2014 personal
communication). Similar behavior is seen in impacts into
610cm-diameter basalt spheres, as reported by Fujiwara and Tsukamoto
(1980; Fig. 5) who present sketches of cross-sectional views of
reconstructed targets showing shell-like fracture surrounding the
remnant cores.
Because of the propensity of many previous laboratory investigations to focus on idealized spherical targets there exists some
ambiguity in decoupling the relative importance/inuence of
impact speed versus spherical shape in producing the onion shell
fragment shapes seen in these experiments. If plate-like fragment
shapes are due primarily to impact speed/energy density as

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D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

suggested by Fujiwara et al. (1989) this could play an important

role in the outcome of impacts onto small monolithic objects in
the main asteroid belt due to the non-negligible probability of
low-speed (i.e., below about 34 km/ssubsonic in rock) impacts
there (Bottke et al., 1994). There is growing interest in spall-type

impacts into initially monolithic rock targets due to the focus on

smaller near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and the blocky fragments in
coarse regoliths observed to exist on objects like Itokawa
(Nakamura et al., 2008; Noguchi et al., 2010) as targets for
exploration missions and mitigation activities (Holsapple and

Fig. 1. (a) Cratering experiments on 1-m-diameter granite spheres (Walker et al., 2013) showing a trend toward at, plate-like shapes for fragments spalled from the near
surface regions surrounding the crater. The impact speed was 2 km/s. (b) Disruptive impacts into 5-cm-diameter soda-lime glass spheres at the same speed display a very
similar fragmentation pattern (Nakamura, 2014 personal communication).

Fig. 2. Our typical irregularly-shaped and spherical basalt targets. The natural, irregularly-shaped targets are hand specimens collected in the eld from the sample site. The
spherical targets we prepared from larger fragments of the same basalt; the darker color is due to infusion of lubricating oil used during the milling process to obtain the
spherical shape. The targets shown here were not shot during this experiment run; they remain for future impact experiments.

D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

Housen, 2013) and the recognition that the cumulative effects of

multiple sub-catastrophic impacts can have the same effect as one
larger, catastrophic impact (Gault and Wedekind, 1969; Housen,
2009). Also, the low bulk densities of NEAs in the 100 m to tens of
km size range suggests that some of these objects may be rubblepiles and that their low densities can be related to the shapes
and mass spectrum of their large components and to the way they
reassemble as gravitational aggregates following shattering
collisions.
A secondary goal of the conducted experiments is to investigate
the theoretical conjecture, supported by numerical modelling (Tanga
et al., 1999; Campo Bagatin and Petit, 2001) involving the role of the
target shape in affecting the mass spectrum of fragments created in
shattering collisions.
We describe here our experiments to investigate the importance of
target shape and impact speed in determining the shapes of fragments from catastrophic impacts.

2. Impact experiments
In order to disentangle the potential effects of both target shape
and impact speed in affecting the shape of fragments we chose to
conduct impact experiments on both spherical and naturally-occurring irregularly-shaped targets of the same basalt material impacted
at a range of speeds (Fig. 2). We used basalt samples obtained from a
recent lava ow exposed in a road cut near Flagstaff, AZ (lat
N351200 59, long W1111330 55). The targets ranged in mass, M, from
238 to 534 g (see Table 1). Because we anticipated reconstructing an
idealized fragment size distribution from imaged fragment shapes
that would then be compared with the measured mass distribution
we needed to obtain the mean density of our basalt samples. We
measured the bulk density of each basalt sphere and several representative samples of the irregularly-shaped basalt targets using the
Archimedean water displacement method. We obtained values of
2.9570.03 g/cm3 (irregular) to 2.9870.05 g/cm3 (spherical) for the
samples.
We impacted a total of six targets (two spheres and four irregular
targets). The mean impact speed for asteroids in the main belt is

5 km/s (Bottke et al., 1994), so we focused on shots with impact
speeds nominally in the
4 to 6 km/s range. For each impact the
projectile was a 3/16th in. (0.476 cm) diameter,
0.1583 g mass
aluminum sphere red at the specied target using the NASA Ames
Vertical Gun Range (AVGR). The targets were each suspended at the
center of the AVGR impact chamber from a thin nylon line such that

79

the incoming projectile path would pass very roughly through the
center of mass of the target. For maximum stability of the target
during the hanging process, particularly in the case of the irregularly-shaped targets, the attach point of the support line for each
target was placed such the target hung with its longest (a) axis
generally in the vertical direction. Because the AVGR has a roughly
1-cm-diameter patch of uncertainty in the targeted impact location
of the projectile, we attempted to roughly align each irregular target
to maximize its collision cross section for the maximum probability
of a good central impact during each shot. We set the alignment of
each target such that the impact point was lined up more or less
with the incoming impactor direction, thus yielding a roughly
normal incidence impact relative to the impacted face of the target.
Although the impactor incidence angle cannot be controlled very
rigorously we note that this may well affect the outcome of any
particular single experiment, but this effect should average out
when considering the outcomes of several experiments. The chamber oor and walls were lined with cloth sheets to provide a soft
buffer to help prevent primary eject from suffering subsequent
fragmentation after colliding with the chamber.
Following each shot, the debris was collected from the oor of
the AVGR chamber. This process typically recovered 495% of the
target mass. Large fragments that were collected from the chamber were individually weighed (to a sample completion limit at
about m 4 0.20 g), representing up to 90% of the original mass.
This allowed us to carefully measure the massfrequency distribution of the largest fragments from each impact experiment.
High-speed video of each impact was obtained by ve different
video cameras (two Phantom V10s, one Phantom V12.1, and two
Shimadzu HPV-1s), with frame rates ranging from 1900 to 125,000
frames/s, to aid interpretation of the fragmentation mode of the
targets. The details of each shot are summarized in Table 1.

3. Results and discussion

Cumulative mass distributions are derived for the six impact
experiments and the results are shown in Fig. 3. As a common
pattern repeatedly shown by past impact experiments, we observe
that for the several largest fragments (depending on each case) no
simple analytic description of the shape of the mass distribution
can be found. For smaller fragments however, power law mass distributions are found with exponents 0.75oo1.2 in the relationship
N(4m)Am  (where m is the fragment mass, is the power law
index, and A is the corresponding constant). This result is found for

Table 1
Shot details for the impact experiments, including impact conditions and outcomes. Target diameter for the irregular targets is the diameter of a sphere with the same mass.
Target b/a and c/a for the irregular targets determined from pre-impact side and top views in the high-speed video frames. fL is the mass of the largest fragment divided by
the target mass. Brackets ( ) indicate average values for each shot.
Shot

130701

130702

130703

130704

130705

130706

Target type
Target mass (g)
Target diameter (cm)
Target b/a, c/a
Impact speed (km/s)
Projectile mass (g)
E/M (J/kg)
fL
Exponent
b/a
c/a

10
F
F10
Porosity

Irregular
433.00
6.54
0.61, 0.45
4.73
0.1587
4100
0.07326
1.00
0.73
0.41
0.61
0.66
0.46
0.35
0.53

Irregular
534.60
7.02
0.66, 0.53
4.45
0.1582
2930
0.13118
0.82
0.73
0.42
0.62
0.62
0.49
0.50
0.51

Spherical
237.90
5.34
1, 1
3.89
0.1584
5040
0.05944
1.22
0.74
0.41
0.62
0.53
0.44
0.31
0.49

Spherical
342.70
6.03
1, 1
3.59
0.1582
2970
0.18494
0.96
0.72
0.38
0.58
0.53
0.45
0.34
0.54

Irregular
479.10
6.77
0.80, 0.78
3.68
0.1582
2240
0.23446
0.75
0.67
0.34
0.54
0.51
0.49
0.48
0.61

Irregular
451.20
6.64
0.56, 0.46
5.82
0.1582
5940
0.02637
1.03
0.73
0.38
0.60
0.58
0.48
0.38
0.54

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D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

variable intervals of m/M, depending on the circumstances of the shot,

but it roughly holds in the range 0.5  10  3 om/Mo0.5  10  2. The
mass of the largest fragment, normalized to the original target mass,
tends to be smaller as the specic energy of the impact grows. The
exponent of each mass distribution is also related to the corresponding specic energy of each impact, as expected (Fujiwara et al., 1989).
Also, the mass distributions seem to show slightly larger values of
(i.e., steeper slopes and relatively smaller fragments) in the case of
spherical targets with respect to irregular ones, when comparing two
sets of close specic energy impacts. However, this behavior needs
further sets of impact experiments to properly check the results by
Tanga et al. (1999) and Campo Bagatin and Petit (2001).
The 36 largest fragments from each shot were photographed
and their largest axes (a and b) accurately measured in the image
analysis software ImageJ (e.g., Fig. 4). Fragments are digitally
imaged on a uniform green background to allow easy chroma
keying in Adobe Photoshop. ImageJ ts an ellipse to the silhouette
of each fragment, yielding a measurement of the a and b axis
length of each fragment.
Their shortest axes (c) were measured by means of a digital
caliper. We note that the process of arranging the fragments for
photography naturally oriented them such that their shortest axes
aligned more or less normal to the green background plane. Thus,
the photographic analysis via ImageJ measured the a and b axes
while the orientation of each fragment was carefully noted during
the manual caliper measurement process to ensure proper determination of c.

Fig. 3. Cumulative massfrequency distributions for each of the impact experiments. M is the mass of the target, m is the mass of the nth fragment. See Table 1
for details of each shot.

Previous investigations carried out in the 1970s and 1980s

(e.g., Capaccioni et al., 1986) showed aspect ratios of b/aE0.7
and c/aE0.5. We found the overall average aspect ratios to be
b/a 0.7270.13 and c/a0.3970.13 (Table 1), with a result for c/a
systematically smaller than reported by Capaccioni et al. (1986).
This result is quite stable over the different impact experiments and
no differences are found in average shapes among spherical and
irregular targets, nor for different specic energy up to a factor of 3.
Obviously, this does not mean that fragments look like 3-axial
ellipsoidal shapes at all; instead they are quite irregular, but their
average relative sizes are distributed as described. Fig. 5 shows
histograms for each shot for both b/a and c/a.
It is interesting to note that the values obtained for b/a are in
agreement with the aspect ratios of boulders on the surface of Eros
(Michikami et al., 2010). On the contrary, although Nakamura et al.
(2008) point out the remarkably good qualitative match between
boulder shapes on Itokawa compared with fragment shapes from
laboratory impact experiments, Michikami et al. (2010) note that
the aspect ratios of boulders on the surface of Itokawa do not match
well with experimental results. They show b/a generally ranging
between 0.62 and 0.68, a difference they found to be statistically
signicant at 95% condence level. It is hard to speculate on the
reasons for such differences. One possible cause may be thermal
fatigue due to temperature changes leading to partial erosion of
some of the boulders on Itokawa that may affect the statistical
distribution of the aspect ratio. Finally, we note with interest that
Tsuchiyama et al. (2014) nd that the shape distribution of particles
returned from the surface of Itokawa by Hayabusa is consistent with
the results of mechanical disaggregation, primarily as a response to
impacts, although we caution that these particles/fragments are all
so small that there may be other processes at work in determining
their shapes. These very small particles/fragments are at the size of
individual mineral grains and there the processes that govern grain
shapes may be quite different (e.g., involving crystal growth within
the rock, etc.) than those that dominate the shapes of macroscopic
impact fragments in laboratory experiments or in the fragmentation
of bulk rock in asteroids.
We have also investigated the shape metrics (c2/ab)1/3 and
F(a b)/(a c) derived from the results of our impact experiments.
These parameters quantify deviation from spherical shape and relative
atness, respectively (Benn and Ballantyne, 1993; Ehlmann et al.,
2008). Values of (0oo1) approaching 1 indicate roundness in the
described fragments whereas low values of closer to 0 indicate at
(oblate) objects. F (0oFo1) is dened when the object is not round.
Values of F close to 1 appear for elongated, cigar-like (prolate), bodies,
while values of F close to 0 account again for oblate objects.

Fig. 4. Example of the process of measuring fragment shapes from photography. Fragments are digitally imaged on a uniform green background to allow easy chroma keying
in Adobe Photoshop (left). The dark bar at the top is an image scale ducial marker (15 cm long in this case). Analysis in ImageJ (right) ts an ellipse to the silhouette of each
fragment, yielding a measurement of the a and b axis length of each fragment.

D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

81

Fig. 5. Histograms of b/a and c/a for each of the shots.

Average values for and F for all measured fragments are quite
close to each other in each shot and do not show signicant
dependence on specic energy, impact speed, or target shape (see
Table 1). Their overall average values are 0.60 and F 0.47.
Dispersion is larger for F values (F0.22) than for (0.12),
indicating that a wide range of shapes is possible. A loose trend
towards more roundish shapes seems to be present as fragment size
decreases. More specically, some of the largest fragments have at
and sometimes plate-like shapes that are less frequently observed
among smaller fragments. This is not clearly related to impact velocity
or specic impact energy. Fig. 6a shows a comparison of values of
between two shots with similar impact speeds, while Fig. 6b compares F for two shots with similar specic energies.
More qualitatively, high speed video from our experiments
clearly shows the formation of shell-like fragments in most of the
cratering and lower-energy disruptive impacts (e.g., Fig. 7). Examining average values for F and for the 10 largest fragments (but
not including the largest fragment itself, which is often a large and
more rounded core), there appears to be a very weak trend toward
values closer to 0 (at shapes) in the lower-speed shots compared
to higher-speed ones (Fig. 8). This reinforces our subjective impression from reviewing the high-speed video and from handling
fragments from the different shots. Looking at the high-speed
videos, shot 130705 shows clearly shelly fragments and it appears
that shot 130703 does as well. Unfortunately, the lights that
illuminate the interior of the impact chamber in support of the
high-speed cameras failed to turn on for shot 130704 so we cannot
compare that spherical targets response to the one from shot
130703. In contrast, we do not see any clearly plate-like fragment
shapes in the video from shots 130701, 130702, and 130706 (higher
impact speeds).
Previous impact experiments (Walker et al., 2013; Nakamura
et al., 2014 personal communication) similarly show shell-like
fragments arising from spallation from the surface of their targets.
An interesting nding of this study is that such fragments can be
produced in disruptive, shattering events as well and are not limited
to spall-type cratering impacts on the targets surface. Instead, shelllike fragments may form well inside the target structure, specically
right around the core, where the largest fragment is often created.
This result seems to be independent of the target shape itself as it

shows up both in irregular and spherical targets (Fig. 9). To our

knowledge, this behavior has not been explicitly reported until now.
There is increasing interest in understanding the internal structure of asteroids (and comets), especially in the case of NEAs,
motivated by space exploration and hazard mitigation strategies.
Asteroid mass measurements can be obtained by sporadic space
missions and estimated with acceptable accuracy in the case of
primaries of binary systems. Accurate shape models can be obtained
by space missions and by radar observations. Combined masses and
shapes/volumes then allow estimates of asteroid densities in some
cases. Compositions inferred from ground based spectroscopic
observations allow the densities of monolithic components to be
estimated. For a given asteroid, the comparison of the components
densities inferred from compositions with the measured bulk
density of the whole body provides estimations of the large scale
porosity (macro-porosity) of the asteroids. Implications for their
internal structure can then be inferred (see additional discussion in
Flynn et al., 2015).
For this reason, we decided to measure the typical bulk density of
the ensemble of collected fragments from each impact experiment
randomly assembled together into a rubble pile. To facilitate assembly of each rubble pile we wrapped all the fragments with measured
mass in thin plastic lm (the kind that is used for wrapping food in
domestic refrigerators) by trying to follow carefully the outer surface
of the obtained aggregate. Each wrapped aggregate was then suspended from a horizontal support and plunged into water inside a
container situated on a weight scale (pan balance method). In this way
we measured the macro-porosities of the six sets of randomly
aggregated fragments corresponding to the six impact experiments.
We found average porosity values for the six sets of fragment
aggregates to be 0.53 (1 0.10). We repeated this measurement after
shufing and re-wrapping each aggregate and obtained an average
value of 0.48 (2 0.10). As a reference, a set of spheres in perfect
hexagonal packing has 26% porosity; this number rises to about 35%
when random packing is allowed. Delaney and Cleary (2010) studied
the general problem of packing in superellipsoids by numerical
methods and found a range of porosities from 0.20 to 0.36 for biaxial
ellipsoidal shapes. Nevertheless, Bezrukov and Stoyan (2006) found
synthetic random packing of oblate 2:1 aspect ratio and prolate
3:1 aspect ratio equal ellipsoids having 0.45 and 0.57 porosities,

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D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

respectively. Our experimental values seem consistent with the latter

reference, although the fragments in each of our impact experiment
have instead irregular shapes (only roughly tri-axial in a mix of prolate
and oblate shapes) and a size distribution.

Estimates of asteroid porosity vary widely in the 0.2 to 0.6 range,

mostly due to poor estimation of mass and, in particular, volume.
There are very few accurate determinations of both mass and shape
(volume) of small rocky bodies believed to have gravitational aggregate structures. In the case of asteroid Itokawa (Lowry et al., 2014) and
Mars satellite Phobos (Ptzold et al., 2014), the large-scale porosity
values range 0.30 to 0.40. Previous estimates of large porosities in

Fig. 7. Still frame from a high-speed video sequence showing the occurrence of
circum-core fragments with plate-like, onion shell shapes.

Fig. 6. (a) for shots 130703 and 130705: two shots with nearly the same impact
speed (3.89 and 3.68 km/s, respectively). (b) F for shots 130702 and 130704: two
shots with nearly the same specic energy (2.93 and 2.97  103 J/kg, respectively).

Fig. 8. Average value of for the 10 largest fragments (excluding the largest
fragment itself) as a function of impact speed.

Fig. 9. Typical shapes of the largest fragments resulting from our disruptive impact experiments at AVGR. Tabular, onion shell fragments are observed from both irregularlyshaped and spherical targets (see also Fig. 7). In both of the panels above, the top left-most fragment is the largest remnant, typically a more spherically-shaped central core.

D.D. Durda et al. / Planetary and Space Science 107 (2015) 7783

asteroids with inaccurate shapes may have the same kind of bias
towards overestimation that we may nd in the volume measurements of wrapped aggregates from our own shattering experiments
reported here. It is very easy to overestimate volumes. For instance,
when we wrap our samples with thin lm as tight as we can, we are
approximating the volume of the aggregate to the volume inside the
lm, which is obviously larger than the true volume of the aggregate
itself. Our typical gathered sample aggregates have approximately
spherical shapes with equivalent radii smaller than about 4 cm. When
wrapping them, it is very easy to have the lm a few mm above the
average surface of the aggregate. A 2- or 3-mm error here translates
into 1520% overestimate of volume and therefore porosity (and this
cannot be quantitatively taken into account in the determination of
the standard deviation). This may cause a 3540% true porosity
showing up as 4550% porosity in the wrapped measured samples.
A similar source for volume overestimation easily arises when
approximating poorly determined asteroid shapes with spheres or
triaxial ellipsoids, causing estimated porosities to be higher than
actual porosities.
4. Conclusions
We have started investigations on the effects of target shape and
projectile impact speed on the massfrequency distribution and
shape of fragments resulting from impacts into basalt targets. A rst
run of experiments was carried out at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun
Range. Analysis of the results of the 6 shots performed shows
negligible dependence of the shape of the massfrequency distribution or the shapes of fragments on target shape. Our subjective
impression from review of the high-speed video and handling of the
fragments from the experiments is that the largest several fragments
from lower-speed impacts tend to exhibit atter shapes than those
from higher-speed impacts. This trend is only very weakly supported,
however, by actual measurements of fragment shapes; the effect of
impact speed (sub vs. super-sonic) needs further investigation to be
fully assessed and future sets of impact experiments are being
planned to better sample the range of possible impact speeds.
We see the formation of attened, plate-like fragment shapes
from both irregular and spherical targets and note with interest
that these fragments can originate from the interior of the target,
near the core (largest fragment), in addition to the attened
fragments often seen in the near-surface spall zone in cratering
experiments.
The porosity of aggregates made by articially (but randomly) reassembling fragments has been measured to be on the order of 50%,
signicantly larger than that for hexagonal lattice and random packing
of ellipsoids, as well as for well determined masses and shapes of
asteroids. We suggest that the found average high porosity is mainly
due to overestimation of the volume in our samples. Volume overestimate may be affecting as well many asteroid volumes with poor
shape determinations. We recommend care in the assessment of high
asteroid porosities. Our results and conclusions suggest that modeling
of both non-spherical shapes and size distributions are needed in
order to properly study and understand the internal structures of
asteroids (and comets).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the NASA Planetary Geology &
Geophysics program, grant NNX11AP22G (to GJF). ACB

83

acknowledges grant AYA2011-30106-C02-02 (2012-2014) by the

Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (now extinct) and
grant PRX12/00129 by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture
and Sports. We thank Chuck Cornelison, Donald B. Bowling,
Alfredo J. Perez, and Adam Parrish of the Ames Vertical Gun Range
for their assistance in conducting the impact experiments, and J.-P.
Wiens for photographic and high-speed video support. We thank
A. Nakamura for the images of the glass fragment from an impact
experiment conducted with support by the Space Plasma Laboratory, ISAS, JAXA.
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