Supercatastrophic

Outcome for supercatastrophic collision with strength dominant. For smaller collisional kinetic energies, the size of the largest fragment increases.

A "supercatastrophic" collision might provide sufficient energy and momentum not only to break up an asteroid but to disperse the fragments as well. In that case, the fragments would depart on independent, but still similar, heliocentric orbits. The fragments would rarely or never meet again, and the asteroid population would have gained a family of smaller asteroids at the expense of a larger body (or two bodies, counting the projectile, which is most likely to be small compared with the target body).

If the target body is spherically layered with sufficient strength contrast, these spherical layers may be stripped away. If the impact is large enough in scale, the target body may be catastrophically fragmented throughout. A fraction of the projectile’s kinetic energy will be partitioned into kinetic energy of the resulting fragments, which will therefore be launched away from the target’s original center of mass. For a very large collision, fragments representing more than half of the target mass may be launched at greater than escape velocity, in which case the body is said to have been catastrophically disrupted. (If >> 50% of the target mass is expelled, the collision is termed supercatastrophic.) Fragments traveling at less than escape velocity will reaccrete on a time scale of minutes to hours. Even if the body is entirely disrupted, if it is in orbit about a massive planet, the fragments will be tightly constrained in short-period orbits around the planet and will be subject to fairly rapid reaccretion. If a collision is off-center, the target body’s spin may be greatly affected.