Hypervelocity Impacts on Rubble Pile Asteroids

The thesis presents a tool to create rubble pile asteroid simulants for use in numerical impact experiments, and provides evidence that the asteroid disruption threshold and the resultant fragment size distribution are sensitive to the distribution of internal voids.

This work explores coastal zones in the vicinity of tidal inlets, which are commonly utilized for navigation, sand mining, waterfront developments and fishing and recreation, are under particularly high population pressure and will only be exacerbated by foreshadowed climate change (CC).