Papers › Impact Excitation of a Seismic Pulse and Vibrational Normal Modes on Asteroid Bennu...
Impact Excitation of a Seismic Pulse and Vibrational Normal Modes on Asteroid Bennu and Associated Slumping of Regolith
Alice C. Quillen, Yuhui Zhao, YuanYuan Chen, Paul Sanchez, Randal C. Nelson, Stephen R. Schwartz
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We consider an impact on an asteroid that is energetic enough to cause resurfacing by seismic reverberation and just below the catastrophic disruption threshold, assuming that seismic waves are not rapidly attenuated. In asteroids with diameter less than 1 km we identify a regime where rare energetic impactors can excite seismic waves with frequencies near those of the asteroid's slowest normal modes. In this regime, the distribution of seismic reverberation is not evenly distributed across the body surface. With mass-spring model elastic simulations, we model impact excitation of seismic waves with a force pulse exerted on the surface and using three different asteroid shape models. The simulations exhibit antipodal focusing and normal mode excitation. If the impulse excited vibrational energy is long lasting, vibrations are highest at impact point, its antipode and at high surface elevations such as an equatorial ridge. A near equatorial impact launches a seismic impulse on a non-spherical body that can be focused on two additional points on an the equatorial ridge. We explore simple flow models for the morphology of vibration induced surface slumping. We find that the initial seismic pulse is unlikely to cause large shape changes. Long lasting seismic reverberation on Bennu caused by a near equatorial impact could have raised the height of its equatorial ridge by a few meters and raised two peaks on it, one near impact site and the other near its antipode.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections