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Organic Matter and the Associated Mineralogy on Small Bodies of the Solar System

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A special issue of Minerals (ISSN 2075-163X). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Mineralogy and Biogeochemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (16 July 2021) | Viewed by 10015

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Vassilissa Vinogradoff

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Guest Editor

Aix-Marseille Université, UMR CNRS 7345, Physique des Interactions Ioniques et Moléculaires, PIIM, France
Interests: astrochemistry; organic matter in solar systems; meteorites; hydrothermal alteration; organo-mineral interactions

Dr. Andrea Raponi

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Guest Editor

IAPS-INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy
Interests: planetary surfaces; small bodies; organic matter in the solar system; ices; mineralogy; radiance modeling

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites new studies on small bodies of the solar system and especially findings that provide insights into their organic matter content.

The search for organics on small bodies involves many aspects. Small bodies are believed to be primitive, non-processed objects; thus, they hold information about the earliest solar system. Moreover, the large amount of organic material on Earth, together with volatiles, would be reasonably explained by its exogenic origin, being released by comets and asteroid bombardment. In this respect, organic matter on small bodies may have favored the prebiotic environment on Earth and possibly on other planets and moons.

In the last decade, space missions devoted to the analysis of small bodies have shed new light on the presence of organic material. The outcomes included the recent discovery of aliphatic organics in the volatile-rich environment of the dwarf planet Ceres, detected by the instruments onboard the NASA Dawn spacecraft, and the large variety of organics on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, detected by the mass spectrometers and the imaging spectrometer onboard ESA/Rosetta spacecraft.

Evaluation of the data collected on these recent missions is still ongoing, and other findings are eagerly anticipated. In particular, the relationship between the organic matter and the onsite mineralogy has not yet been established in most cases.

For this Special Issue, we invite recent advances in the study of small bodies’ mineralogy and organic matter content in an effort to better understand the survival of such organic matter, its composition, and its relations to the mineralogy.

Fresh findings from the current space missions devoted to the study of asteroids and Kuiper belt objects (OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa 2, New Horizons) are also welcome.

Insights into the following aspects will be greatly appreciated:

Evolution of organic matter and its relationship with salts, clays, and volatiles;
Effect of hydrothermal alteration on the organic and mineral content;
Existence of a past ocean world;
Insight into the abundance and composition of organic matter;
Physical properties of the regolith rich in organic matter (e.g., grain size, porosity, albedo);
Geological context and evolution scenarios of organic-rich terrains;
Connection between the outgassing environment and surface composition;
Space weather and physical processes altering the surface composition.

Dr. Vassilissa Vinogradoff
Dr. Andrea Raponi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Minerals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Organic matter in the solar system
Ceres chemistry
Ocean world
Dwarf planet
Astrobiology
Planetary surface

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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32 pages, 17847 KiB

Open AccessArticle

VIS-IR Spectroscopy of Mixtures of Water Ice, Organic Matter, and Opaque Mineral in Support of Small Body Remote Sensing Observations

by Mauro Ciarniello, Lyuba V. Moroz, Olivier Poch, Vassilissa Vinogradoff, Pierre Beck, Batiste Rousseau, Istiqomah Istiqomah, Robin Sultana, Andrea Raponi, Gianrico Filacchione, David Kappel, Antoine Pommerol, Stefan E. Schröder, Cedric Pilorget, Eric Quirico, Vito Mennella and Bernard Schmitt

Minerals 2021, 11(11), 1222; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/min11111222 - 03 Nov 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1934

Abstract

Visual-to-infrared (VIS-IR) remote sensing observations of different classes of outer solar system objects indicate the presence of water ice and organics. Here, we present laboratory reflectance spectra in the 0.5–4.2

μ

m spectral range of binary particulate mixtures of water ice, organics analogue [...] Read more.

μ

m spectral range of binary particulate mixtures of water ice, organics analogue (kerite), and an opaque iron sulphide phase (pyrrhotite) to investigate the spectral effects of varying mixing ratios, endmember grain size, and mixing modality. The laboratory spectra are also compared to different implementations of the Hapke reflectance model (Hapke, 2012). We find that minor amounts (≲1 wt%) of kerite (investigated grain sizes of 45–63

μ

m and <25

μ

m) can remain undetected when mixed in coarse-grained (67 ± 31

μ

m) water ice, suggesting that organics similar to meteoritic insoluble organic matter (IOM) might be characterized by larger detectability thresholds. Additionally, our measurements indicate that the VIS absolute reflectance of water ice-containing mixtures is not necessarily monotonically linked to water ice abundance. The latter is better constrained by spectral indicators such as the band depths of water ice VIS-IR diagnostic absorptions and spectral slopes. Simulation of laboratory spectra of intimate mixtures with a semi-empirical formulation of the Hapke model suggests that simplistic assumptions on the endmember grain size distribution and shape may lead to estimated mixing ratios considerably offset from the nominal values. Finally, laboratory spectra of water ice grains with fine-grained pyrrhotite inclusions (intraparticle mixture) have been positively compared with a modified version of the Hapke model from Lucey and Riner (2011). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Organic Matter and the Associated Mineralogy on Small Bodies of the Solar System)

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18 pages, 3642 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Laboratory Investigations Coupled to VIR/Dawn Observations to Quantify the Large Concentrations of Organic Matter on Ceres

by Vassilissa Vinogradoff, Giovanni Poggiali, Andrea Raponi, Mauro Ciarniello, Simone De Angelis, Marco Ferrari, Julie C Castillo-Rogez, John Brucato and Maria-Cristina De Sanctis

Minerals 2021, 11(7), 719; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/min11070719 - 03 Jul 2021

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3610

Abstract

Organic matter directly observed at the surface of an inner planetary body is quite infrequent due to the usual low abundance of such matter and the limitation of the infrared technique. Fortuitously, the Dawn mission has revealed, thanks to the Visible and InfraRed mapping spectrometer (VIR), large areas rich in organic matter at the surface of Ceres, near Ernutet crater. The origin of the organic matter and its abundance in association with minerals, as indicated by the low altitude VIR data, remains unclear, but multiple lines of evidence support an endogenous origin. Here, we report an experimental investigation to determine the abundance of the aliphatic carbon signature observed on Ceres. We produced relevant analogues containing ammoniated-phyllosilicates, carbonates, aliphatic carbons (coals), and magnetite or amorphous carbon as darkening agents, and measured their reflectance by infrared spectroscopy. Measurements of these organic-rich analogues were directly compared to the VIR spectra taken from different locations around Ernutet crater. We found that the absolute reflectance of our analogues is at least two orders of magnitude higher than Ceres, but the depths of absorption bands match nicely the ones of the organic-rich Ceres spectra. The choices of the different components are discussed in comparison with VIR data. Relative abundances of the components are extrapolated from the spectra and mixture composition, considering that the differences in reflectance level is mainly due to optical effects. Absorption bands of Ceres’ organic-rich spectra are best reproduced by around 20 wt.% of carbon (a third being aliphatic carbons), in association with around 20 wt.% of carbonates, 15 wt.% of ammoniated-phyllosilicate, 20 wt.% of Mg-phyllosilicates, and 25 wt.% of darkening agent. Results also highlight the pertinence to use laboratory analogues in addition to models for planetary surface characterization. Such large quantities of organic materials near Ernutet crater, in addition to the amorphous carbon suspected on a global scale, requires a concentration mechanism whose nature is still unknown but that could potentially be relevant to other large volatile-rich bodies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Organic Matter and the Associated Mineralogy on Small Bodies of the Solar System)

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Review

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15 pages, 4056 KiB

Open AccessReview

Organic Matter and Associated Minerals on the Dwarf Planet Ceres

by Maria Cristina De Sanctis and Eleonora Ammannito

Minerals 2021, 11(8), 799; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/min11080799 - 22 Jul 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3450

Abstract

Ceres is the largest object in the main belt and it is also the most water-rich body in the inner solar system besides the Earth. The discoveries made by the Dawn Mission revealed that the composition of Ceres includes organic material, with a component of carbon globally present and also a high quantity of localized aliphatic organics in specific areas. The inferred mineralogy of Ceres indicates the long-term activity of a large body of liquid water that produced the alteration minerals discovered on its surface, including ammonia-bearing minerals. To explain the presence of ammonium in the phyllosilicates, Ceres must have accreted organic matter, ammonia, water and carbon present in the protoplanetary formation region. It is conceivable that Ceres may have also processed and transformed its own original organic matter that could have been modified by the pervasive hydrothermal alteration. The coexistence of phyllosilicates, magnetite, carbonates, salts, organics and a high carbon content point to rock–water alteration playing an important role in promoting widespread carbon occurrence. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Organic Matter and the Associated Mineralogy on Small Bodies of the Solar System)

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