meteorites tagged posts

Schematic of the history of precipitation of moganite and subsurface H2O ice in the Moon. Credit: Masahiro Kayama and M. Sasaoka (SASAMI-GEO-SCIENCE)

A team of researchers led by Masahiro Kayama of Tohoku University has found evidence in a lunar meteorite that water once existed on the moon. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the team describes their study of the meteorite and why they believe it offers evidence of water on the moon. Water on the moon, some have suggested, would be valuable, because it could support a colony—or perhaps be used for other purposes, such as powering spacecraft. But thus far, efforts to find any below the surface in the more temperate regions have come up empty-handed...

A NASA team scanned these terrestrial rock samples, all measuring two to four inches in diameter, to investigate possibilities for future in-space use of non-destructive evaluation techniques. The two rock samples on the bottom are from Earth’s newest volcanic island in the Kingdom of Tonga; the sample on the upper left from kilometers deep contains large green olivine crystals and came from Oahu in Hawaii. The sample on the upper right is a 3.7-million-year old impact melt breccia from the Elgygytgyn impact crater in Siberia. Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

A diagnostic tool, similar in theory to those used by the medical profession to non-invasively image internal organs, bones, soft tissue, and blood vessels, could be equally effective at “triaging” extraterrestrial rocks and other samples befor...

Artist’s rendering of the space collision 466 million years ago that gave rise to many of the meteorites falling today. Credit: © Don Davis, Southwest Research Institute.

466 million years ago, there was a giant collision in outer space. Something hit an asteroid and broke it apart, sending chunks of rock falling to Earth as meteorites since before the time of the dinosaurs. But what kinds of meteorites were making their way to Earth before that collision? In a new study in Nature Astronomy, scientists have tackled that question by creating the first reconstruction of the distribution of meteorite types before the collision. They discovered that most of the meteorites we see today are rare, while many meteorites that are rare today were common before the collision.

Philipp Heck of The Fie...

Chondrules — spherical beads of previously molten material — found in CB chondrites were formed by ultra-high-speed collisions. New research suggests that the presence of the planet Jupiter near the asteroid belt could create the right conditions for these impacts. That helps constrain the timing for Jupiter’s formation and migration. The study suggests that Jupiter must have been at full size when the chondrules formed, which was about 5 million years after the first solar system solids appeared. Credit: Alexander Krot, University of Hawai’i Manoa

A peculiar class of meteorites has offered scientists new clues about when the planet Jupiter took shape and wandered through the solar system...