Skip to content
Home » Note, Paper: To Shoot Ryugu

Note, Paper: To Shoot Ryugu

  • by

Here’s something different. In American Mineralogist (vol. 110):

Tomioka, N. Kurosawa, K. Miyake, A. et al.  Progressive change in dislocation microstructures in shocked calcite with pressure: Characterization of micrometeoroid bombardment on asteroid Ryugu  p. 945   am-2024-9540

Experimental astronomy again. As part of studying asteroid (162173) Ryugu, the authors bombard a material simulator target with stand-in micrometeorites, using a hypervelocity gun. What hypotheses pan out, what don’t, and what unknowns and gotchas might arise just by going through the exercise? That’s the point of experiments. Assuming the simulations can be made realistic enough, the results will be much more credible than assumptions, estimations, and conjecture. In this case, yes, the Ryugu stand-in is no leap of logic, impact ballistics is also well-defined, and the physics of gun launch and the hypervelocity pellet is certainly no showstopper.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *