Isotopic Compositions of Cometary Matter Returned by Stardust
- Creators
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McKeegan, Kevin D.
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Aléon, Jerome
- Bradley, John
- Brownlee, Donald
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Busemann, Henner
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Butterworth, Anna
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Chaussidon, Marc
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Fallon, Stewart
- Floss, Christine
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Gilmour, Jamie
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Gounelle, Matthieu
- Graham, Giles
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Guan, Yunbin
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Heck, Philipp R.
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Hoppe, Peter
- Hutcheon, Ian D.
- Huth, Joachim
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Ishii, Hope
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Ito, Motoo
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Jacobsen, Stein B.
- Kearsley, Anton
- Leshin, Laurie A.
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Liu, Ming-Chang
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Lyon, Ian
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Marhas, Kuljeet
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Marty, Bernard
- Matrajt, Graciela
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Meibom, Anders
- Messenger, Scott
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Mostefaoui, Smail
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Mukhopadhyay, Sujoy
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Nakamura-Messenger, Keiko
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NIttler, Larry
- Palma, Russ
- Pepin, Robert O.
- Papanastassiou, Dimitri A.
- Robert, François
- Schlutter, Dennis
- Snead, Christopher J.
- Stadermann, Frank J.
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Stroud, Rhonda
- Tsou, Peter
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Westphal, Andrew
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Young, Edward D.
- Ziegler, Karen
- Zimmerman, Laurent
- Zinner, Ernst
Abstract
Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopic compositions are heterogeneous among comet 81P/Wild 2 particle fragments; however, extreme isotopic anomalies are rare, indicating that the comet is not a pristine aggregate of presolar materials. Nonterrestrial nitrogen and neon isotope ratios suggest that indigenous organic matter and highly volatile materials were successfully collected. Except for a single ^(17)O-enriched circumstellar stardust grain, silicate and oxide minerals have oxygen isotopic compositions consistent with solar system origin. One refractory grain is ^(16)O-enriched, like refractory inclusions in meteorites, suggesting that Wild 2 contains material formed at high temperature in the inner solar system and transported to the Kuiper belt before comet accretion.
Additional Information
© 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 6 October 2006; accepted 17 November 2006. We thank D. Burnett and G. J. Wasserburg for helpful advice and encouragement during the Preliminary Examination. We acknowledge financial support from the NASA Cosmochemistry Program, the NASA Sample Return Laboratory Instrumentation and Data Analysis Program, the Stardust Participating Scientist Program, the NSF Instrumentation and Facilities Program, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the CNRS France Etats-Unis program, and the Région Lorraine. Aspects of this work were performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, under Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48. We also thank the scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Lockheed Martin Astronautics whose dedication and skill brought these precious samples back to Earth.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - McKeegan.SOM.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 51880
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.1135992
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141118-081613400
- NASA
- Stardust Participating Scientist Program
- NSF
- Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
- Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Région Lorraine
- W-7405-ENG-48
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- Created
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2014-11-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-03-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field