High-velocity solid ejecta fragments from hypervelocity impacts

The recent discovery of meteorites from the moon and the strong probability that the 8 SNC (Shergottite, Nakhlite and Chassignite) meteorites originated on Mars indicate that large hypervelocity impacts eject some solid debris at very high speed (more than 2.5 and 5 km/sec in the above cases). The standard Hugoniot relation between particle velocity and shock pressure predicts that lunar ejecta should be very heavily shocked (40–50 GPa) and Martian ejecta should be vaporized (100–200 GPa). However, the lunar meteorite ALHA 81005 was in fact subjected to less than 15 GPa, while the most highly shocked SNC meteorite was exposed to ca. 50 GPa, while others showing no detectable shock damage at all.

Theoretical work shows that the normal Hugoniot relation doesn't apply in the vicinity of a free surface. The free surface is, by definition, a pressure-free boundary, so shock pressures on it must be identically zero. On the other hand, the acceleration of debris is proportional to the pressure gradient, so that near-surface material may be accelerated to high speed and still escape compression to correspondingly high pressure. This process occurs only in a restricted zone near the free surface. The thickness of this zone is proportional to the rise time of the stress-wave pulse generated by the impact.

The rise time of the stress wave generated by a large impact is typically a/v_i, where a is the projectile radius and v_i its impact velocity. The near-surface zone in this case is comparable in thickness to a fraction of the projectile radius. Since the cratering event itself displaces many thousands of times the projectile mass, the quantity of lightly-shocked, high speed ejecta is small, amounting to only a few percent of the projectile's mass (for ejecta speed>few km/sec). The fastest solid ejecta leave at about 1/2 the impact velocity.

Although the total quantity of high speed solid ejecta is thus small in comparison to the total crater ejecta, it is significant because no other process yields such high velocity fragments. Many meteorites appear to be near-surface samples of their parent bodies (many are regolith samples and one is a vesicular lava) and so may have been ejected by this process.