"Adam's work has shown that ordinary chondrite asteroids can appear as carbonaceous in our classification tools if they are affected by shock darkening. Finding a near-Earth asteroid dominated by this process has implications for impact hazard assessment," Reddy said. But impact melt and shock-darkening effects on meteorites derived from these bodies are rare.
"Impacts are very common in asteroids and any solid body in the solar system because we see impact craters on these objects from spacecraft images. Reddy co-leads the Space Domain Awareness lab at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory with engineering professor Roberto Furfaro. "This process has been seen in meteorites many times but has only been seen on asteroids in one or two cases way out in the main asteroid belt, which is found between Mars and Jupiter."īattle's adviser and study co-author Vishnu Reddy,a planetary sciences professor, discovered shock darkening on main belt asteroids in 20. "Shock darkening is an alteration process caused when something impacts a planetary body hard enough that the temperatures partially or fully melt those rocks and alter their appearance both to the human eye and in our data," said lead study author Adam Battle, a UArizona graduate student studying planetary science. When pieces of asteroids break off into space and then land on Earth, they are considered meteorites. The near-Earth asteroid is about 1 1/2 miles wide and made a close approach to Earth in April 2020. In a new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal, University of Arizona scientists identified an asteroid named 1998 OR2 as one potential source of shock-darkened meteorites.
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