Ryugu's Anhydrous Ingredients and Their Spectral Link to Primitive Dust from the Outer Solar System

Ryugu is a second-generation C-type asteroid formed by the reassembly of fragments of a previous larger body in the main asteroid belt. While the majority of Ryugu samples returned by Hayabusa2 are composed of a lithology dominated by aqueously altered minerals, clasts of pristine olivine and pyroxene remain in the least-altered lithologies. These clasts are objects of great interest for revealing the composition of the dust from which the original building blocks of Ryugu's parent asteroid formed. Here we show that some grains rich in olivine, pyroxene, and amorphous silicates discovered in one millimeter-sized stone of Ryugu have infrared spectra similar to the D-type asteroid Hektor (a Jupiter Trojan), to comet Hale-Bopp, and to some anhydrous interplanetary dust particles of probable cometary origin. This result indicates that Ryugu's primary parent body incorporated anhydrous ingredients similar to the building blocks of asteroids (and possibly some comets) formed in the outer solar system, and that Ryugu retained valuable information on the formation and evolution of planetesimals at different epochs of our solar system's history.

Automated summary

Ryugu is a second-generation C-type asteroid formed by the reassembly of fragments of a previous larger body in the main asteroid belt. Majority of Ryugu samples returned by Hayabusa2 are composed of aqueously altered minerals, but clasts of pristine olivine and pyroxene remain in the least-altered lithologies. Some grains in Ryugu have infrared spectra similar to D-type asteroid Hektor, comet Hale-Bopp, and anhydrous interplanetary dust particles, suggesting that Ryugu's primary parent body incorporated anhydrous ingredients similar to building blocks of asteroids and comets formed in the outer solar system.