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C. Agnor (University of Colorado), R. M. Canup, H. F. Levison (Southwest Research Institute)
We have performed direct N-body integrations of the final stages of terrestrial planet formation, following the evolution of 50 initial bodies for approximately 200 million years. We utilize a newly developed algorithm, "SYMBA" (Duncan et al. 1998, in press), which is capable of handling close encounters in a completely symplectic manner. Our starting conditions are motivated by recent results of mid-stage accretion simulations (Weidenshilling et al. 1997), which show that most of the mass in the terrestrial region is contained in the largest few tens of bodies after approximately a million years. In particular, our study has been directed towards the analysis of the type and frequency of giant impact events that occur during the final stage of terrestrial planet formation.