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Their survival inside Moon soil suggests that ancient water-bearing asteroids once bombarded the Earth Moon system more often than meteorite collections alone show.<\/p>\n
The Moon and CI chondrites<\/p>\n
China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-6 <\/a>mission brought the first samples from the Moon\u2019s far side back to Earth. The return capsule carried a little over 4 pounds of dusty rock and glass rich soil from a landscape no human has visited.<\/p>\n Leading the new analysis is Jintuan Wang, a geochemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS<\/a>). His research focuses on how meteorites transfer material, including water, between asteroids, planets, and the Moon in the early Solar System.<\/p>\n Chang\u2019e-6 landed inside the Apollo Basin, a crater nested within the giant South Pole Aitken Basin on the lunar far side.<\/p>\n This region likely exposes very old rocks from deep in the Moon\u2019s crust, which makes it a rich hunting ground for ancient impact debris.<\/p>\n Unlike Earth, the Moon<\/a> has no air to slow incoming rocks, so most meteorites slam into its surface at enormous speeds.<\/p>\n Fragile types such as CI chondrite material would usually be expected to vaporize, melt, or be blasted back into space during those impacts.<\/p>\n Rare kind of space rock<\/p>\n Because CI chondrite rocks are soft and porous, they tend to crumble when racing through a planet\u2019s atmosphere or striking the ground as they did on the Moon.<\/p>\n Only a small number have ever been recovered on Earth, which makes any new trace of them especially valuable.<\/p>\n Sample return missions from near-Earth asteroids now show that some of these bodies closely resemble CI chondrites.<\/p>\n Analyses of grains from asteroid Ryugu found that its oxygen isotopes<\/a>, atoms of an element with different masses, match those in rare CI meteorites.<\/p>\n CI chondrites are also chemically primitive, meaning they preserve a mixture of elements close to that of the early Solar System.<\/p>\n Finding CI chondrite dust sealed in the Moon<\/a>\u2018s soil therefore offers a kind of long-term record of what once orbited near Earth.<\/p>\n China, the Moon, and CI chondrite<\/p>\n Back in laboratories on Earth, the team sifted through more than 5,000 small fragments from the Chang\u2019e-6 sample. Most of these bits were pieces of lunar regolith, a loose layer of dust and crushed rock.<\/p>\n Researchers concentrated on grains containing olivine, a magnesium iron mineral common in volcanic rocks and many meteorites.<\/p>\n They mounted and polished these grains, then examined them using scanning electron<\/a> microscopes and other tools that can measure chemistry in microscopic regions.<\/p>\n Among the thousands of pieces, the team identified seven olivine rich clasts, small rock fragments welded into other material.<\/p>\n Their ratios of iron, manganese, and nickel matched those seen in CI like meteorites, according to a study from Wang and colleagues.<\/p>\n The clasts also showed crystals of olivine set inside a glassy matrix, the signature of impact melt, rock briefly liquefied by an impact.<\/p>\n That texture indicates that the asteroid material melted when it struck the Moon, then cooled so quickly that its chemistry stayed frozen in place.<\/p>\n Connection to lunar water<\/p>\n Scientists suspect that volatiles, easily vaporized substances like water and carbon dioxide, reached the young Moon when asteroids smashed into it.<\/p>\n Studies of lunar rocks indicate that water-rich carbonaceous asteroids provided most of the Moon\u2019s water.<\/p>\n The CI-like clasts in the Chang\u2019e-6 soil give direct physical evidence that this fragile class of asteroid really did hit the Moon<\/a>. <\/p>\n Because those impacts likely happened early, the material trapped in the soil records conditions from a time when Earth was still forming its oceans.<\/p>\n Wang\u2019s team estimates that CI-like impactors could make up roughly 30 percent of the meteoritic material mixed into the Moon\u2019s soil. <\/p>\n If that estimate is correct, many of the projectiles that struck the Earth Moon system may have been rich in water and other volatiles.<\/p>\n CI chondrites and Moon missions<\/p>\n If CI type asteroids struck the Moon, they almost certainly hit Earth during the same period. Those impacts would have carried water and carbon-rich material that helped shape Earth\u2019s early surface.<\/p>\n Samples from Ryugu and Bennu show that small bodies can hold organic compounds and water. The Moon<\/a> adds support by preserving dust from similar asteroids that arrived long ago.<\/p>\n Future sample missions will help reveal how common CI-like material was in the inner Solar System.<\/p>\n The team notes that their method for identifying outside material in returned samples can help with that work.<\/p>\n The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven tiny grains of dust from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-6 Moon mission have revealed traces of an unusually fragile, CI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-203119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}