Ceres and the Terrestrial Planets Impact Cratering Record

Robert G. Strom, Simone Marchi, Renu Malhotra
(Submitted on 4 Apr 2018)

Dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, has a surface that exhibits a range of crater densities for a crater diameter range of 5-300 km. In all areas the shape of the craters’ size-frequency distribution is very similar to those of the most ancient heavily cratered surfaces on the terrestrial planets. The most heavily cratered terrain on Ceres covers ~15% of its surface and has a crater density similar to the highest crater density on <1% of the lunar highlands. This region of higher crater density on Ceres probably records the high impact rate at early times and indicates that the other 85% of Ceres was partly resurfaced after the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) at ~4 Ga. The Ceres cratering record strongly indicates that the period of Late Heavy Bombardment originated from an impactor population whose size-frequency distribution resembles that of the Main Belt Asteroids. Comments:    published in Icarus (March 2018)
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1804.01229 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1804.01229v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Renu Malhotra
[v1] Wed, 4 Apr 2018 03:56:48 GMT (3779kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01229