Other
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21533405m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #334.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.433
Other
Scientific paper
The majority of V-type asteroids and HED meteorites are thought to be genetically related to one another (Consolmagno & Drake 1977) as collisional fragments that originated on the surface of the large basaltic asteroid 4 Vesta (Binzel & Xu 1993). However, recent near-infrared observations with the SpeX instrument at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility reveal distinct spectroscopic differences between these asteroids and meteorites (Moskovitz et al. 2009). In particular the ratio of areas of the 1- and 2-micron pyroxene-olivine absorption bands (which are characteristic of planetary basalts) are generally larger for the asteroids than for the meteorites. This finding is surprising in light of the traditional view that Vesta and it collisional family of asteroids have fresh, unweathered surfaces that should spectroscopically resemble the HED meteorites (Pieters et al. 2006). Several phenomena could be responsible for this spectroscopic difference: terrestrial weathering of the meteorites, temperature differences between the asteroids ( 180 K) and the meteorites ( 300 K) at the time of observation, differences in grain size between the asteroid regoliths and meteorite samples, uncorrected systematics related to the telescopic observations, compositional differences, or weathering of the asteroid surfaces due to their exposure to the space environment. Future plans to investigate the cause of this discrepancy include the application of spectral mixing models (Lawrence & Lucey 2007) and laboratory experiments to simulate space weathering by micrometeorite bombardment. We will present the current state of this work with an emphasis on what seems to be the mostly likely cause for the observed spectral dissimilarity, namely the effects of space weathering on the surface of V-type asteroids. These efforts represent important steps towards the interpretation of data from the Visible and Infrared Spectrograph onboard the Dawn spacecraft, which will rendezvous with Vesta in the summer of 2011.
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