2011 Interdisciplinary Summer School: Granular Flows

Asteroid Simulations

Derek C. Richardson, University of Maryland

I will present our research group’s approach to simulating asteroid dynamics, including catastrophic collisions, gravitational reaccumulation, and the formation of binary asteroids. This work is motivated by mounting evidence that many small asteroids may be rubble piles (gravitational aggregates). I will discuss a hard-sphere discrete element method of modeling gravitational aggregates using the parallel N-body tree code pkdgrav, with an emphasis on its advantages and limitations.

http://www.astro.umd.edu/~dcr/reprints/walsh_asl4,311.pdf