Impact Cratering on Small Asteroids and into Coarse Regoliths

Impact cratering on the smallest asteroids can result in crater and other associated impact scar morphologies that we do not usually see exhibited in imagery of larger main-belt asteroids and airless moons. The NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft at (433) Eros and the Hayabusa spacecraft at (25143) Itokawa showed the surfaces of these near-Earth asteroids to be relatively depleted in smaller craters. 'Armoring' of the surface by the presence of boulders larger than the size of the projectiles needed to form the missing craters has been proposed as one possible contributing factor in the observed depletion. Indeed, a number of bright spots observed on the surfaces of some boulders on Itokawa appear to have a size distribution consistent with small projectiles and have been interpreted as impact scars - an extreme end member example of the armoring hypothesis. Several research teams have conducted a number of laboratory impact experiments focusing on the range of morphological expression of craters formed in coarse regoliths where the impacting projectiles are comparable in size to the regolith grains. The results of these experiments suggest that craters become less well defined and more irregular in shape as soon as the regolith target grains are larger than the projectiles. I will give an overview of the range of visual appearance of impact features on small asteroids, review the results of some previous laboratory experiments relevant to the armoring hypothesis, and present results of our own new impact experiments conducted at the Ames Vertical Gun Range to examine the range of morphological expression of impacts onto blocks on and in the regolith of small airless bodies.