A new method to determine the grain size of planetary regolith
By B. Gundlach, J. Blum. 2012
206 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Airless planetary bodies are covered by a dusty layer called regolith. The grain size of the regolith determines the temperature and the mechanical strength of the surface layers. Thus, knowledge of the grain size of planetary regolith helps to prepare future landing and/or sample-return missions. In this work, we present a method to determine the grain size of planetary regolith by using remote measurements of the thermal inertia. We found that small bodies in the Solar System (diameter less than ∼100 km) are covered by relatively coarse regolith grains with typical particle sizes in the millimeter to centimeter regime, whereas large objects possess very fine regolith with grain sizes between 10 μm and 100 μm.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fffdc6900f5e033aaf628f1221d344dc608a454
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- V. Hamilton
- Kevin J. Walsh
- Philip R. Christensen
- J. Bandfield
- William Bottke
- Patrick Michel
- R. Binzel
- M. Delbo’
Citations in the corpus
- OSIRIS-REx: Sample Return from Asteroid (101955) Bennu (2017, methodology): “Individual facets on the global shape model will adopt values of tilt and average grain size based on the global shape model and the thermal inertia map, respectively (where average grain size is estimated from thermal inertia using the algorithm of Gundlach and Blum 2013).”
- Properties of rubble-pile asteroid (101955) Bennu from OSIRIS-REx imaging and thermal analysis (2019, methodology): “Gundlach, B. & Blum, J. Outgassing of icy bodies in the Solar System – II: Heat transport in dry, porous surface dust layers.”
- Rubble Pile Asteroids (2018, background): “…relying on the physical foundation of thermal inertia being built on conduction between touching grains formalisms for turning a measured thermal inertia value into a grain size, or average grain size, have been built and can be compared to these measured values (Gundlach and Blum 2013).”