Investigation of Effective Material Properties of Stony Meteorites

To assess the threat posed by an asteroid entering Earth's atmosphere, one must predict if, when, and how it fragments during entry. A comprehensive understanding of the Asteroid material properties is needed to achieve this objective. At present, the meteorite material found on Earth are the only objects from an entering asteroid that can be used as representative material and be tested inside a laboratory setting. Therefore, unit cell models are developed to determine the effective material properties of stony meteorites and in turn deduce the properties of asteroids. The unit cell is representative volume that accounts for diverse minerals, porosity, and matrix composition inside a meteorite. The various classes under investigation includes H-class, L-class, and LL-class chondrites. The effective mechanical properties such as Young's Modulus and Poisson's Ratio of the unit cell are calculated by performing several hundreds of Monte-Carlo simulations. Terrestrial analogs such as Basalt and Gabbro are being used to validate the unit cell methodology.