Dust production from the hypervelocity impact disruption of the Murchison hydrous CM2 meteorite: Implications for the disruption of hydrous asteroids and the production of interplanetary dust

• Published in: Planetary and space science Vol. 57; no. 2; pp. 119 - 126
• Main Authors: Flynn, G.J., Durda, D.D., Sandel, L.E., Kreft, J.W., Strait, M.M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2009
• Subjects: Asteroid disruption; Catastrophic disruption; Interplanetary dust; Meteorites; Murchison meteorite; Meteorites; Interplanetary dust; Catastrophic disruption; Murchison meteorite; Asteroid disruption
• ISSN: 0032-0633; 1873-5088
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pss.2008.09.005

More than half of the C-type asteroids, the dominant type of asteroid in the outer half of the main-belt, show evidence of hydration in their reflectance spectra. In order to understand the collisional evolution of asteroids and the production of interplanetary dust and to model the infrared signature of small particles in the Solar System it is important to characterize the dust production from primary impact disruption events, and compare the disruption of hydrous and anhydrous targets. We performed a hypervelocity impact disruption experiment on an ∼30 g target of the Murchison CM2 hydrated carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, and compared the results with our previous disruption experiments on anhydrous meteorites including Allende, a CV3 carbonaceous chondrite, and nine ordinary chondrites. Murchison is significantly more friable than the ordinary chondrites or Allende. Nonetheless, on a plot of mass of the largest fragment versus specific impact energy, the Murchison disruption plots within the field of the anhydrous meteorites points, suggesting that Murchison is at least as resistant to impact disruption as the anhydrous meteorites, which require about twice the energy for disruption as terrestrial anhydrous basalt targets. We determined the mass–frequency distribution of the debris from the Murchison disruption over a nine order-of-magnitude mass range, from ∼10 −9 g to the mass of the largest fragment produced in the disruption. The cumulative mass–frequency distribution from the Murchison disruption is fit by three power-law segments. For masses >10 −2 g the slope is only slightly steeper than that of the corresponding segment from the disruption of most anhydrous meteorites. Over the range from ∼10 −6 to 10 −2 g the slope is significantly steeper than that for the anhydrous meteorites. For masses <10 −6 g the slopes of both the Murchison and the anhydrous meteorites are almost flat. Thus the Murchison disruption significantly over-produced small fragments (10 −6–10 −3 g) compared to anhydrous meteorite targets. If the Murchison results are representative of hydrous asteroids, the hydrous asteroids may dominate over anhydrous asteroids in the production of interplanetary dust >100 μm in size, the size of micrometeorites recovered from the polar ices, while both types of asteroids might produce comparable amounts of ∼10 μm interplanetary dust. This would explain the puzzle that polar micrometeorites (>100 μm in size) are similar to hydrous meteorites, while the majority of the ∼10 μm interplanetary dust particles are anhydrous.