The Relative Effects of Surface and Subsurface Morphology on the Deflection Efficiency of Kinetic Impactors: Implications for the DART Mission

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission impacted Dimorphos, the moonlet of the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos, on 2022 September 26 and successfully tested a kinetic impactor as an asteroid deflection technique. The success of the deflection was partly due to the momentum of the excavated ejecta material, which provided an extra push to change Dimorphos’s orbital period. Preimpact images provided constraints on the surface but not the subsurface morphology of Dimorphos. DART observations indicated that Dimorphos contained a boulder-strewn surface, with an impact site located between a cluster of large surface boulders. In order to better understand the momentum enhancement factor (β) resulting from the impact, we performed impact simulations into two types of targets: idealized homogeneous targets with a single boulder of varying size and buried depth at the impact site and an assembly of boulders at the impact site with subsurface layers. We investigated the relative effects of surface morphology to subsurface morphology to put constraints on the modeling phase space for DART following impact. We found that surface features created a 30%–96% armoring effect on β, with large surface boulders measuring on the order of the spacecraft bus creating the largest effect. Subsurface effects were more subtle (3%–23%) and resulted in an antiarmoring effect on β, even when layers/boulders were close to the surface. We also compared our 2D axisymmetric models to a 3D rectilinear model to understand the effects of grid geometry and dimension on deflection efficiency computational results.