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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00084-5 | DOI Listing |
Nature
January 2025
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
Evaporation or freezing of water-rich fluids with dilute concentrations of dissolved salts can produce brines, as observed in closed basins on Earth and detected by remote sensing on icy bodies in the outer Solar System. The mineralogical evolution of these brines is well understood in regard to terrestrial environments, but poorly constrained for extraterrestrial systems owing to a lack of direct sampling. Here we report the occurrence of salt minerals in samples of the asteroid (101955) Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRapid Commun Mass Spectrom
April 2025
Solar System Exploration Division, NASA Goddard Space Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.
Rationale: Extraterrestrial amines and ammonia are critical ingredients for the formation of astrobiologically important compounds such as amino acids and nucleobases. However, conventional methods for analyzing the composition and isotopic ratios of volatile amines suffer from lengthy derivatization and purification procedures, high sample mass consumption, and chromatographic interferences from derivatization reagents and non-target compounds.
Methods: Here we demonstrate a highly efficient method to analyze the composition and compound specific isotopic ratios of C to C amines as well as ammonia based on solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) on-fiber derivatization.
Nat Commun
July 2024
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Aerospaziali, Politecnico di Milano-Bovisa Campus, Milano, Italy.
Asteroids smaller than 10 km are thought to be rubble piles formed from the reaccumulation of fragments produced in the catastrophic disruption of parent bodies. Ground-based observations reveal that some of these asteroids are today binary systems, in which a smaller secondary orbits a larger primary asteroid. However, how these asteroids became binary systems remains unclear.
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