Description: A small “contact damping” stiffness is automatically activated by default in some cases during early iterations for the finite-sliding, surface-to-surface contact formulation to help prevent unconstrained initial rigid body modes and improve convergence behavior. This contact damping targets situations in which at least one point near a slave node is initially touching the master surface but the average initial distance between the surfaces near the slave node corresponds to a gap (such that the initial contact constraint status would be inactive). This contact damping typically has negligible effect on results and is completely removed by the end of the first step.