Asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • News & Views |

    NASA’s DART mission showed how a kinetic impact can be deployed to enhance the momentum change of a near-Earth asteroid while giving us the first up-close view of a binary asteroid system.

    • Adriano Campo Bagatin

  • Editorial |

    Recent missions to the rubble-pile asteroids Bennu and Ryugu have revealed asteroid surfaces that continue to be actively modified by a variety of processes while also recording the geologic history of these small bodies.

  • News & Views |

    The surface of the asteroid Bennu is so weakly bonded that rockslide avalanches are easily triggered by small body impacts, and boulders fractured due to diurnal heating and cooling are readily dislodged. The result is a surface under continuous renewal.

    • Masahiko Arakawa

  • Article |

    Pluto’s subsurface ocean may have formed early due to accretionary heating, a comparison of thermal evolution modelling with observed tectonic structures suggests.

    • Carver J. Bierson
    • , Francis Nimmo
    •  & S. Alan Stern

  • Editorial |

    The geological similarities between icy and rocky worlds invite comparison and cross-fertilization of knowledge.

  • News & Views |

    The large domes found on the dwarf planet Ceres may not result from cryovolcanism, but from solid-state flow analogous to salt doming on Earth, according to numerical simulations of gravitational loading.

    • Michael Küppers

  • Article |

    Ahuna Mons dome on Ceres formed by extrusion of a mixture of brine and solids sourced from a muddy mantle plume, according to numerical modelling of slurry rheology and a gravity anomaly found by the Dawn mission.

    • Ottaviano Ruesch
    • , Antonio Genova
    •  & Maria T. Zuber

  • Article |

    Mesosiderite meteorites may originate from a hit-and-run impact on the parent asteroid of eucrite meteorites (probably Vesta), as mesosiderite zircon U–Pb ages are found to coincide with those for eucrites.

    • Makiko K. Haba
    • , Jörn-Frederik Wotzlaw
    •  & Maria Schönbächler

  • Article |

    Pluto’s subsurface ocean and thickness variation in its ice shell may be maintained by a layer of methane clathrates forming an insulating cap to the ocean, according to calculations of thermal evolution and viscous relaxation.

    • Shunichi Kamata
    • , Francis Nimmo
    •  & Atsushi Tani

  • Article |

    Niobium may be sequestered into the cores of some asteroids rather than remaining in their mantles according to measurements of meteorites and partitioning experiments. Accretion of such asteroids may explain why Earth’s mantle is depleted in niobium.

    • Carsten Münker
    • , Raúl O. C. Fonseca
    •  & Toni Schulz

  • Article |

    The timing and number of large impact basins on early Mars are poorly constrained. Gravity and topographic analyses support a lull in basin-forming impacts following the main stage of accretion.

    • William F. Bottke
    •  & Jeffrey C. Andrews-Hanna

  • Article |

    Despite evidence for an ice-rich outer shell, little water ice has been observed on the surface of Ceres. Lobate morphologies observed on Ceres that are increasingly prevalent towards the dwarf planet’s poles are consistent with ice-rich flows.

    • Britney E. Schmidt
    • , Kynan H. G. Hughson
    •  & Carol A. Raymond

  • News & Views |

    Anomalously bright spots are seen on the dark cratered surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft's detection of sodium carbonates in bright areas is consistent with aqueous activity in an ice-poor and salty regolith.

    • Mikhail Zolotov

  • Commentary |

    The New Horizons mission has revealed Pluto and its moon Charon to be geologically active worlds. The familiar, yet exotic, landforms suggest that geologic processes operate similarly across the Solar System, even in its cold outer reaches.

    • Paul Schenk
    •  & Francis Nimmo

  • Letter |

    Mercury’s surface is darker than expected given its low iron content. The delivery of cometary carbon to Mercury in micrometeorite impacts may explain the planet’s globally low reflectance.

    • Megan Bruck Syal
    • , Peter H. Schultz
    •  & Miriam A. Riner

  • Editorial |

    Melt rocks returned from the Moon date to a narrow interval of lunar bombardment about 4 billion years ago. There is now evidence to show that this so-called Late Heavy Bombardment spanned the entire Solar System.

  • News & Views |

    Patches of deposits containing unusual mafic minerals are observed in and around some large lunar impact craters. Numerical simulations suggest that in the slowest of these impacts, asteroidal material, alien to the Moon, could have survived.

    • Erik Asphaug

  • Article |

    Lunar samples suggest that the inner Solar System was bombarded by asteroids about 4 Gyr ago. Radiometric ages of meteorites suggest an unusual number of high-velocity asteroids at this time, consistent with a dynamical origin of the bombardment in which the asteroids were pushed by outer planet migration onto highly eccentric orbits.

    • S. Marchi
    • , W. F. Bottke
    •  & C. T. Russell

  • Letter |

    Diogenite meteorites are thought to represent mantle rocks that formed as cumulates in magma chambers on 4 Vesta or a similar differentiated asteroid. Microstructural analysis of olivine grains from a diogenite meteorite show that the preferred orientation of their crystal lattice was formed through plastic deformation, indicating dynamic, planet-like processes in its parent body.

    • B. J. Tkalcec
    • , G. J. Golabek
    •  & F. E. Brenker

  • Editorial |

    While the Olympics kick off in London, a new international sporting arena is taking shape beyond Earth's orbit. Recent advances in space exploration by China and Japan remind us that curiosity about our universe is a truly universal trait.

  • Letter |

    The mantles of the terrestrial planets contain elemental abundances that suggest accretion continued at a late stage, after core formation. Geochemical data of meteorites from differentiated asteroids are consistent with such a late accretion event, suggesting that the phenomenon occurred throughout the Solar System and was related to planet formation.

    • James M. D. Day
    • , Richard J. Walker
    •  & Douglas Rumble III

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