Collisional and Rotational Disruption of Asteroids
  Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us
understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies
that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their
formation, these small bodies have kept at least some unmodified primordial
material from the solar nebula. However, the structural properties of asteroids
have been modified considerably since their formation. Thus, we can find among
them a great variety of physical configurations and dynamical histories. In
fact, with only a few possible exceptions, all asteroids have been modified or
completely disrupted many times during the age of the Solar System. This
picture is supported by data from space mission encounters with asteroids that
show much diversity of shape, bulk density, surface morphology, and other
features. Moreover, the gravitational attraction of these bodies is so small
that some physical processes occur in a manner far removed from our common
experience on Earth. Thus, each visit to a small body has generated as many
questions as it has answered. In this review we discuss the current state of
research into asteroid disruption processes, focusing on collisional and
rotational mechanisms. We find that recent advances in modeling catastrophic
disruption by collisions have provided important insights into asteroid
internal structures and a deeper understanding of asteroid families. Rotational
disruption, by tidal encounters or thermal effects, is responsible for altering
many smaller asteroids, and is at the origin of many binary asteroids and oddly
shaped bodies.
