Impact processes play a fundamental role in the formation and evolution of the terrestrial planets and other cosmic bodies in the solar system. Especially, large scale collisions like the Moon-forming event but also smaller impacts have heavily influenced the thermochemical evolution of the Earth-Moon System. Besides variations in the compositional budget such impacts transfer a significant amount of energy to heat up the planet that might cause the formation of local magma ponds or even global magma oceans. Finding the amount of melt that is generated in the cause of these events is key to understand the early evolution of both bodies. By using numerical models based on iSALE and conducting series of impacts with varying model parameters we can determine the impact-induced melt volume, study the mechanism of melt production and locate the melt during and right after impact events. For instance, our results can provide a rough estimate of those impact conditions that lead to the formation of a magma ocean instead of generating localized or regional melt ponds.
Fig.: Time sequence illustrating the melt generation of an 300 km in diameter large impactor hitting the Moon.
Modelling magma ocean