Publication Date:
2011-08-27
Description:
The Hayabusa spacecraft successfully recovered dust particles from the surface of near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa. Synchrotron-radiation x-ray diffraction and transmission and scanning electron microscope analyses indicate that the mineralogy and mineral chemistry of the Itokawa dust particles are identical to those of thermally metamorphosed LL chondrites, consistent with spectroscopic observations made from Earth and by the Hayabusa spacecraft. Our results directly demonstrate that ordinary chondrites, the most abundant meteorites found on Earth, come from S-type asteroids. Mineral chemistry indicates that the majority of regolith surface particles suffered long-term thermal annealing and subsequent impact shock, suggesting that Itokawa is an asteroid made of reassembled pieces of the interior portions of a once larger asteroid.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Nakamura, Tomoki -- Noguchi, Takaaki -- Tanaka, Masahiko -- Zolensky, Michael E -- Kimura, Makoto -- Tsuchiyama, Akira -- Nakato, Aiko -- Ogami, Toshihiro -- Ishida, Hatsumi -- Uesugi, Masayuki -- Yada, Toru -- Shirai, Kei -- Fujimura, Akio -- Okazaki, Ryuji -- Sandford, Scott A -- Ishibashi, Yukihiro -- Abe, Masanao -- Okada, Tatsuaki -- Ueno, Munetaka -- Mukai, Toshifumi -- Yoshikawa, Makoto -- Kawaguchi, Junichiro -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Aug 26;333(6046):1113-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1207758.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth and Planetary Material Sciences, Faculty of Science, Tohoku University, Aoba, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8578, Japan. tomoki@m.tohoku.ac.jp〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21868667" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
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Medicine
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Natural Sciences in General
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Physics
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