Erik Asphaug
CURRENT Research and other stuff:
Science Friday live from downtown Phoenix -- 3/29/13, talking about impacts and moons and planets.
Late Origin of the Saturn System (Asphaug and Reufer, Icarus 2013). We argue, based on collisional simulations, that the Saturn system is so unique because its original satellite system merged, forming Titan and the middle-sized moons.
Similar Sized Collisions and the Diversity of Planets (Asphaug 2010). The collisions that formed the Earth left us with strange meteorites and stunted planets like Mercury along the way. See my talk at the SETI Institute including speculative models concerning chondrules and Saturn’s moons.
BIRTH OF THE MOON and the lunar farside
NPR Morning Edition I discuss the origin of the lunar farside (Jutzi and Asphaug, Nature, 2011); also BBC’s Material World with Quentin Cooper, and NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. More recently, Science Friday again, on the origin of the Moon.
Origin of CHONDRULES
Chondrule Origin by Planetesimal Accretion (Asphaug, Jutzi and Movshovitz, 2011), introduces the idea that chondrules are droplets formed by hydrostatic pressure unloading during accretionary ejections. Do colliding planets erupt like so much champagne?
asteroids
What are asteroids? What happens when they strike Earth, Mars, the Moon, or one another? How do they respond to seismogenic collisions? What is Phobos?
I’ve learned, at last, that people generally find asteroids boring unless they are going to kill you, but I guess that’s OK.
COMETS
What makes them break apart so spectacularly? Are they welded cometesimals, dirty snowballs, or layered piles? A comet scientist must be able to say “Schwassmann-Wachmann 3” and “67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko” in one sentence.
MISSIONS TO sMALL WORLDS
The website tiling is from JAXA’S Hayabusa mission to asteroid Itokawa, at about 1:100 scale. Where are we going next? Can we guide a potentially hazerdous asteroid into a useful orbit by hitting it with disposed-of booster rockets? Can we capture one? And if so, what would we do with it?
This Fall I joined the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at ASU, in Tempe, Arizona. The Ronald Greeley Chair honors a great Arizona scientist, and a friend and mentor. I hope to continue his blend of empirical and theoretical research, advancing into areas related to microgravity geology on asteroids, comets and small moons, and deployable spacecraft.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Through 2012 I was a professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UCSC, helping to create their planetary sciences program. Santa Cruz is a spectacular home to some of the world’s most creative students and faculty, and is not easy to leave!
BIOSketch
Phobos, the innermost moon of Mars, imaged in 1989 by the Russian Фобос-2 mission. Color processed by Ted Stryk. I never fail to be moved by this image -- a charcoal-black world the size of Mt. Shasta, possibly a captured primitive asteroid, in front of the dusty plains of Mars. Is it a stepping stone for human exploration beyond Earth? Is it doomed?
I study planetary physics at large & small scales: the giant impacts that formed the Earth and Moon and other planets, and the microgravity geology of comets and asteroids.
