Ejecta Curtains and Ground Ice on Mars: Efficiencies of Volatile Release
Abstract
One of the leading hypotheses that might account for a vigorous hydrologic cycle in the late Hesperian on Mars is that major impact events injected near-surface water into the atmosphere (Segura et al. 2001). In particular, a 50 km diameter impactor is calculated to deposit several meters of "rock rain" globally, potentially triggering the widespread global release of water from ground ice. While the release of volatiles near the impact site is a comparatively simple matter of plotting shock levels as a function of distance, and assuming that target rocks shocked to greater than a given level release all their ice as vapor (Dey, 1989), the potentially greater effect is how efficiently the crater ejecta, which is far more widespread, releases vapor. Near the crater thick sheets of poorly sorted but shock-heated materials plow up the surface at relatively low velocities. Far from the crater the ejecta strike the surface at high velocities but are more thinly spread or confined to discrete patches or jets. Beginning with 1D models, and moving to 2D and eventually 3D models, we examine, using the adaptive-mesh Eulerian hydrocode SAGE (Gisler et al. 2004), the effect of crater ejecta and secondary impacts on the transient volatile budget in the proposed late Hesperian hydrologic cycles. We make use of advanced equations of state, including mixed Alluvium-H20 equation of state in the ice-saturated regolith.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004AGUFM.P41A0888P
- Keywords:
-
- 5420 Impact phenomena (includes cratering);
- 5470 Surface materials and properties;
- 6225 Mars