CATASTROPHIC FRAGMENTATION AND FORMATION OF FAMILIES: PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM A NEW NUMERICAL MODEL

Preliminary results of an improved version of the semiempirical model for catastrophic break up processes developed by Paolicchi et al., (1989) are presented. Among the several changes with respect to the old version, the most important seem to be related to the new treatment of gravitational effects, including self-compression and reaccumulation of fragments. In particular, the new model is able to analyze processes involving both cm-sized objects, like those studied by means of laboratory experiments, as well as much larger bodies, for which self- gravitational effects are dominant; moreover, in this latter case the model seems in principle adequate to describe with the same physics very different phenomena, like the formation of plausible asteroid families and the creation of single, rapidly spinning, objects. This fact, if confirmed by refined analyses, may be of high importance for our general understanding of asteroid collisional evolution.