A Combined WDS, EDS and Cathodoluminescence Study of Carbonate Grains in Water-Rich Meteorites

Currently, over 60,000 named meteorites are listed in the Meteoritical Bulletin Database Each meteorite provides another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that allows us to build up a picture of our Solar System. Some meteorites were blasted off the surface of Mars, some come from the Moon, but the most common meteorites in our collections come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Often these meteorites are remnants of small asteroids that never underwent differentiation (the full-scale melting that caused denser iron to settle out and form a core, as happened on Earth and Mars), and so are relatively pristine remnants of the very earliest material to have formed in our Solar System. Some of these meteorites contain up to 22% water bound into the structure of their minerals [e.g. 2]. This water was incorporated as ices into the host asteroid when it accreted, and was subsequently melted when the asteroid suffered heating from impacts or by the decay of radioactive elements also contained within the asteroid, forming new minerals.