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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
We present some preliminary results of a series of catastrophic break-up experiments carried out in the open, against targets of natural and artificial rock, with and without a harder core. These experiments were aimed at investigating the outcomes of hypervelocity impact disruption phenomena, designed to understand the influence of large-scale collisions on the evolution of asteroids and other small solar system bodies. For the first time in this kind of experiments, evidence was found of collimated jets, i.e. the ejection of a statistically significant number of fragments all closely aligned about some preferential planes. Moreover, the presence of some groups of fragments lying close to each other on the ground was also detected.