Small Body Grooves - Redux, Vesta bets? Options

[Guest_Morganism_*]

Anyone seen any published papers out there on the grooves yet?

Thinking we are going to see them on Vesta......

[algorimancer]

Getting a little side-tracked here... but if the decaying ring theory is correct as a source of the ridges (and I've been an advocate of this), then where are the ridges on Mercury? It seems to have all the right ingredients, no atmosphere, reasonably spherical, and deep in the Sun's gravity well such that it should regularly get whacked by asteroids/comets, a good fraction of which should have grazing impacts which would generate a ring. Possibly the problem is that the gravity is TOO great, so that the fraction of grazing impacts which generates a ring is very small, implying (as I may have mentioned before) that there is an optimal mass range where grazing impacts yield (largely non-equatorial) rings which decay to yield ridges as the body rotates during decaying-ring/planet interaction events. I really wish I knew enough about the physics involved -- not just orbital dynamics but also impact and fluid dynamics -- to do a good simulation of the process. All I have is mental models :/

Speaking as a statistician, we need more samples to say anything definitive. Vesta and Ceres will help. My mental model isn't good enough to make a believable prediction with regard to whether we'll see the grooves on Vesta or Ceres; it would be neat to see grooves on both, but with a declining trend due to increasing mass.

EDIT: Actually, looking at this linked image of Mercury from Phil Stooke (from the Messenger section):

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/scienc...mp;image_id=442

I note an awful lot of elliptical or wedge-shaped craters and crater chains. Perhaps this is what happens (as opposed to ridges) at the high end of the mass range as an impact-derived ring decays. Interesting.