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
