Ronald-Louis Ballouz

and 15 more

The OSIRIS-REx mission collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid (101955) Bennu in October 2020. Here we study the impact of the OSIRIS-REx Touch-and-Go Sampling Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) interacting with the surface of an asteroid in the framework of granular physics. Traditional approaches to estimating the penetration depth of a projectile into a granular medium include force laws and scaling relationships formulated from laboratory experiments in terrestrial-gravity conditions. However, it is unclear that these formulations extend to the OSIRIS-REx scenario of a 1300-kg spacecraft interacting with regolith in a microgravity environment. We studied the TAGSAM interaction with Bennu through numerical simulations using two collisional codes, pkdgrav and GDC-i. We validated their accuracy by reproducing the results of laboratory impact experiments in terrestrial gravity. We then performed TAGSAM penetration simulations varying the following geotechnical properties of the regolith: packing fraction (P), bulk density, inter-particle cohesion (σc), and angle of friction (ɸ). We find that the outcome of a spacecraft-regolith impact has a non-linear dependence on packing fraction. Closely packed regolith (P≳0.6) can effectively resist the penetration of TAGSAM if ɸ≳28° and/or σc≳50 Pa. For loosely packed regolith (P≲0.5), the penetration depth is governed by a drag force that scales with impact velocity to the 4/3 power, consistent with energy conservation. We discuss the importance of low-speed impact studies for predicting and interpreting spacecraft-surface interactions. We show that these low-energy events also provide a framework for interpreting the burial depths of large boulders in asteroidal regolith.