Boulders on Lutetia

More than 200 boulders are among the many prominent geological features seen on Lutetia by the OSIRIS cameras onboard Rosetta. Most are concentrated around the central crater in Baetica regio with a few more apparently associated with Patavium crater. The size range of boulders visible to OSIRIS is about 60-300 m. We model the trajectories of boulders ejected from the central crater and show that their distribution is consistent with most of them being created from that crater, similar to the situation on asteroid Eros where most of the boulders are believed to originate from Shoemaker crater. We evaluate various destruction mechanisms for ejecta blocks and conclude that, using current estimates of the number of small asteroids in the main belt, destruction by impacts of small (several meters diameter) projectiles limits the lifetime of the boulders (and the age of the central crater) to a maximum of 300 million years. Since several analyses of crater ages and size distributions also come up with surprisingly young ages, the size-frequency distribution of small main-belt asteroids (below the size currently reached by surveys) may warrant to be revisited. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.