Atmospheric erosion induced by oblique impacts

Abstract

Previous investigations of impact-induced atmospheric erosion considered vertical impacts only. Numerical simulations of oblique impacts presented in this paper show that the loss of air strongly depends on trajectory inclination and it increases as the impact angle decreases. The results of numerical simulations over the wide range of impact parameters (projectile sizes from 1 to 30 km, impact velocities from 15 to 70 km/s, escape velocities from 5 to 11.2 km/s, projectile densities from 1 to 3.3 g/cm3, normal atmospheric densities varying by three orders of magnitude) can be approximated by simple analytical formulae.