SPH-BASED SIMULATION OF MULTI- MATERIAL ASTEROID COLLISIONS

Abstract We give a brief introduction to smoothed particle hydrodynamics meth-ods for continuum mechanics. Specifically, we present our 3D SPH code to simulate and analyze collisions of asteroids consisting of two types of material: basaltic rock and ice. We consider effects like brittle fail-ure, fragmentation, and merging in different impact scenarios. After validating our code against previously published results we present first collision results based on measured values for the Weibull flaw distribu-tion parameters of basalt