The late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust recorded by eucrites and diogenites as an astrochemical window into the formation of Jupiter and the early evolution of the Solar System

For decades the limited thickness of Vesta's basaltic crust, revealed by the link between the asteroid and the howardite-eucrite-diogenite family of meteorites, and its survival to collisional erosion offered an important constraint for the study of the early evolution of the Solar System. Some results of the Dawn mission, however, cast doubts on our understanding of Vesta's interior composition and of the characteristics of its basaltic crust, weakening this classical constraint. In this work we investigate the late accretion and erosion experienced by Vesta's crust after its differentiation and recorded in the composition of eucrites and diogenites and show that it offers an astrochemical window into the earliest evolution of the Solar System. In our proof-of-concept case study focusing on the late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust during the growth and migration of Jupiter, the water enrichment of eucrites appears to be a sensitive function of Jupiter's migration while the enrichment in highly-siderophile elements of diogenites appears to be particularly sensitive to the size-frequency distribution of the planetesimals. The picture depicted by the enrichments created by late accretion in eucrites and diogenites is not qualitatively affected by the uncertainty on the primordial mass of Vesta. Crustal erosion, instead, is more significantly affected by said uncertainty and Vesta's crust survival appears to be mainly useful to study violent collisional scenarios where highly energetic impacts can strip significant amounts of vestan material while limitedly contributing to Vesta's late accretion. Our results suggest that the astrochemical record of the late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust provided by eucrites and diogenites can be used as a tool to investigate any process or scenario associated to the evolution of primordial Vesta and of the early Solar System.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication on Icaru

Olivine on Vesta as exogenous contaminants brought by impacts: Constraints from modeling Vesta's collisional history and from impact simulations

The survival of asteroid Vesta during the violent early history of the Solar System is a pivotal constraint on theories of planetary formation. Particularly important from this perspective is the amount of olivine excavated from the vestan mantle by impacts, as this constrains both the interior structure of Vesta and the number of major impacts the asteroid suffered during its life. The NASA Dawn mission revealed that olivine is present on Vesta's surface in limited quantities, concentrated in small patches at a handful of sites and interpreted as the result of the excavation of endogenous olivine. Later works raised the possibility that the olivine had an exogenous origin, based on the geologic and spectral features of the deposits. In this work we quantitatively explore the proposed scenario of a exogenous origin for the detected olivine to investigate whether its presence on Vesta can be explained as a natural outcome of the collisional history of the asteroid. We took advantage of the impact contamination model previously developed to study the origin and amount of dark and hydrated materials observed by Dawn on Vesta, which we updated by performing dedicated hydrocode impact simulations. We show that the exogenous delivery of olivine by impacts can offer a viable explanation for the currently identified olivine-rich sites without violating the constraint posed by the lack of global olivine signatures on Vesta. Our results indicate that no mantle excavation is in principle required to explain the observations of the Dawn mission and support the idea that the vestan crust could be thicker than indicated by simple geochemical models based on the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite family of meteorites.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication on the journal Icaru

Kinetics of interaction of oxygen plasma with graphite

Translated from Russian (Fiz. Khim. Obrab. Mater. 1997 (5) 56-59)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9023.190(9709)T / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

The probability of heterogeneous recombination of hydrogen atoms in low-temperature hydrogen plasma

In the group of the optical methods, the investigations of the process of recombination of the hydrogen atoms were studied mainly by the jet procedure, based on the measurement of the dependence of the intensity of radiation of the discharge on the speed of flow of particles which makes it possible to obtain information on the processes of annihilation of active particles on the surface of the discharge device both in the zone of plasma at outside to the zone (in the post glow region). However, to realise this method, it is necessary to use higher linear speed of the flow of the particles and this creates additional technical difficulties. A similar disadvantage is not found in the calculation methods of technical application with special reference to the examination of the processes of heterogeneous recombination of the atoms in the low-temperature hydrogen plasma is the main task of this workTranslated from Russian (Fiz. Khim. Obrab. Mater. 1997 (5) p. 140-145)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9023.190(9664)T / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Plasma chemical etching of gallium arsenide in chlorine

One of the most promising methods, used for the examination of the kinetics and determination of the moments of the start and completion of the processes of plasma chemical etching of a wide range of inorganic materials is optical emission spectroscopy. Therefore, the aim of this work was to examine the kinetic relationships of etching of gallium arsenide in chlorine plasma and determine the possibilities of the optical emission spectroscopy for examination and control of the processTranslated from Russian (Fiz. Khim. Obrab. Mater., 1997 (1) p. 47-51)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9023.190(VR-Trans-9270)T / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Is Vesta an intact and pristine protoplanet?

It is difficult to find a Vesta model of iron core, pyroxene and olivine-rich mantle, and HED crust that can match the joint constraints of (a) Vesta's density and core size as reported by the Dawn spacecraft team; (b) the chemical trends of the HED meteorites, including the depletion of sodium, the FeO abundance, and the trace element enrichments; and (c) the absence of exposed mantle material on Vesta's surface, among Vestoid asteroids, or in our collection of basaltic meteorites. These conclusions are based entirely on mass-balance and density arguments, independent of any particular formation scenario for the HED meteorites themselves. We suggest that Vesta either formed from source material with non-chondritic composition or underwent after its formation a radical physical alteration, possibly caused by collisional processes, that affected its global composition and interior structure. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved