An important ARES strength is the complementarity between sample-analytical approaches and our facilities for experimental simulation of planetary processes. These include impact and cratering, and high-temperature and -pressure petrological processes. Hypervelocity impact is a fundamental process that shapes the surfaces of the rocky planets and small bodies in our solar system. Impact cratering affects the evolution of landforms, development of regoliths, and possibly provides ephemeral habitable environments on Mars. ARES scientists perform impact experiments to understand, for example, fundamental effects on the cratering process due to target and projectile properties, and the nature and extent of regolith generation and gardening. Such results can provide inputs to numerical hydrocode models of impact.

ARES scientists also use high-temperature and high-pressure experiments to reproduce the conditions on and inside planetary bodies (mainly Earth, Moon, Vesta, Mercury, Venus, and Mars) where processes took place that gave rise to igneous rocks. With this type of information, accretion, differentiation, and magmatic models can be constructed that help explain how terrestrial planets form, in general, and how particular magmatic processes produce the igneous rocks we observe today. These studies range from detailed simulation of the crystallization of individual meteorites to high-fidelity simulations of magma ocean solidification to element partitioning studies that bear on the processes of terrestrial planetary core and mantle formation and evolution, and the origin of planetary volatiles.

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