George James Flynn

The Hayabusa2 space mission recently retrieved 5.4 g of material from asteroid Ryugu, providing the first direct access to pristine material from a carbonaceous asteroid. This study employs a novel combination of non-invasive synchrotron X-ray techniques to examine microscale chemistry (elemental distributions and element-specific chemical speciation and local structure) inside Ryugu grains without physically cutting the samples. Manganese primarily occurs in carbonate: Mn-bearing dolomite with minor earlier ankerite. Iron sulfides present as large single grains and as smaller particles in the finer-grained matrix are both predominantly pyrrhotite. At the 5 μm scale, Fe sulfides do not show the mineralogical heterogeneity seen in many carbonaceous meteorites but exhibit some heterogeneous localized oxidation. Iron is present often as intergrowths of oxide and sulfide, indicating incomplete replacement. Trace selenium substitutes for S in pyrrhotite. Copper is present as Fe-poor Cu sulfide. These results demonstrate multiple episodes of fluid alteration on the parent body, including partial oxidation, and help constrain the sequence or evolution of fluids and processes that resulted in the current grain-scale mineralogical composition of Ryugu materials.

Many cosmic dust particles have escaped the aqueous and thermal processing, the gravitational compaction, and the impact shocks that often overprint the record, in most larger samples, of how Solar System materials formed. The least-altered types of cosmic dust can, therefore, act as probes into the conditions of the solar protoplanetary disk when the first solids formed. Analyses of these “primitive” particles indicate that the protoplanetary disk was well mixed, that it contained submicron grains formed in a diversity of environments, that these grains were aerodynamically transported prior to aggregation, which was likely aided by organic grain coatings, and that some minerals that condensed directly from the disk are not found in other materials. These protoplanetary aggregates are not represented in any type of meteorite or terrestrial rock. They can only be studied from cosmic dust.

The chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles (CP IDPs), fragments of asteroids and comets collected by NASA high-altitude research aircraft from the Earth’s stratosphere, are recognized as the least altered samples of the original dust of the Solar Nebula available for laboratory examination. We performed high-resolution, ~25 nm/pixel, x-ray imaging and spectroscopy on ultramicrotome sections of CP IDPs, which are aggregates of >10⁴ grains, and identified and characterized ~100 nm thick coatings of organic matter on the surfaces of the individual grains. We estimated the minimum tensile strength of this organic glue to be ~150 to 325 N/m², comparable to the strength of the weakest cometary meteors, based on the observation that the individual grains of ~5 μm diameter aggregate CP IDPs are not ejected from the particle by electrostatic repulsion due to charging of these IDPs to 10 to 15 volts at 1 A.U. in space. Since organic coatings can increase the sticking coefficient over that of bare mineral grains, these organic grain coatings are likely to have been a significant aid in grain sticking in the Solar Nebula, allowing the first dust particles to aggregate over a much wider range of collision speeds than for bare mineral grains.

We measured the elemental compositions of material from 23 particles in aerogel and from residue in seven craters in aluminum foil that was collected during passage of the Stardust spacecraft through the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2. These particles are chemically heterogeneous at the largest size scale analyzed (∼180 ng). The mean elemental composition of this Wild 2 material is consistent with the CI meteorite composition, which is thought to represent the bulk composition of the solar system, for the elements Mg, Si, Mn, Fe, and Ni to 35%, and for Ca and Ti to 60%. The elements Cu, Zn, and Ga appear enriched in this Wild 2 material, which suggests that the CI meteorites may not represent the solar system composition for these moderately volatile minor elements.