Ray Systems in Granular Cratering.

In classical experiments of granular cratering, a ball dropped on an evened-out bed of grains ends up within a crater surrounded by a uniform blanket of ejecta. In this Letter, we show that the uniform blanket of ejecta changes to a ray system, or set of radial streaks of ejecta, where the surface of the granular bed includes undulations, a factor that has not been addressed to date. By carrying out numerous experiments and computational simulations thereof, we ascertain that the number of rays in a ray system ∝D/λ, where D is the diameter of the ball and λ is the wavelength of the undulations. Further, we show that the ejecta in a ray system originates in a narrow annulus of diameter D with the center at the site of impact. Our findings may help shed light on the enigmatic ray systems that ring many impact craters on the Moon and other planetary bodies.

Size Sorting on the Rubble-Pile Asteroid Itokawa.

Photographs of the asteroid Itokawa reveal unexpectedly strong size segregation between lowlands populated almost entirely by small pebbles and highlands consisting of larger boulders. We propose that this segregation may be caused by a simple and unexplored effect: pebbles accreting onto the asteroid rebound from boulders, but sink into pebbly regions. By number, overwhelmingly more particles on Itokawa are pebbles, and collisions involving these pebbles must unavoidably cause pebbly regions to grow. We carry out experiments and simulations that demonstrate that this mechanism of size sorting based on simple counting of grains produces strong lateral segregation that reliably obeys an analytic formula.