Re: Impact Scenarios?

[Rich Travsky <RTRAVSKY@UWYO.EDU>]

On Mon, 8 May 1995, Tom Holtz wrote:
> [...]
> >I also recently read (I _think_ it was an Aviation Week - wished I'd
> >photocopied the article) about asteroids with companion satelites.
> >These companions are either small chunks orbiting the larger piece
> >and are broken off bits of the larger one or are gravitationally
> >captured. At any rate, if one impacts, the other does too, and some
> >crater sites (moon, etc.) can be explained as the result of a strike
> >by such a pair.
> 
> There have been hypotheses that a single asteroid "calved" to produce
> multiple impacts, and the recent discovery of asteroid "moons" suggests
> that there are other mechanisms which could produce multiple associated
> impacts.  However, one would expect that these collisions would be
> temporally associated in the scale of days or months or years or centuries
> (or minutes?), and not ten million years or more.
> 
Which, in my mind, would enhance the effects of the preceding impact,
following so closely afterwards.

Rich