Chemical evolution of primordial salts and organic sulfur molecules in the asteroid 162173 Ryugu

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acknowledgement

The Hayabusa2 project was led by ISAS (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science)/JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with DLR (German Space Center) and CNES (French Space Center), and supported by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and ASA (Australian Space Agency). We thank the members of the Astromaterials Science Research Group (ASRG) at ISAS, and the Hayabusa2 curation team for conducting the sampling and quality control management. We express our deep appreciation for the constructive and insightful comments from Dr. E. Quirico. We also thank Y. Nakanishi of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. for support of the chemical assessment and the molecular-specific identification by mass spectrometry; Y. Yoshikawa of JAMSTEC for laboratory assistance; Mr. Kumazoe of Kyushu University for solvent extraction of the Tarda, Aguas Zarcas, and Jbilet Winselwan meteorites; Y. Kobayashi of Metrohm Japan for technical support with the ion chromatography; and Dr. Y Tamenori for advice on the chemical species of sulfur. Preliminary reports based on the current results were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in 2020 and 2022. This research was partly supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) under KAKENHI grant numbers 21H01204 (TYoshimura), 21H04501&21H05414 (YO), 21J00504 (TK), 21KK0062 (YT), and 20H00202 (HN). JPD and JCA are grateful to NASA for support of the Consortium for Hayabusa2 Analysis of Organic Solubles.

Contributions

These authors contributed equally: Toshihiro Yoshimura, Yoshinori Takano.

TYoshimura, YTakano, H.N., and J.P.D. conceived the study. H.N. and YTakano conducted the sequential extraction and distributed the SOM samples. TYoshimura conducted IC analysis. D.A. and TYoshimura conducted the ICP analysis and the evaluation of the Mg isotopic composition. H.N., Y.O., T.K., MYamaguchi, and TSuzuki conducted the Orbitrap analysis. YTakano, TYoshikawa, and SatoruTanaka performed the small-scale aqueous analysis of pH with authentic standards. N.O.O. and N.O. performed small-scale elemental analysis of sulfur and isotopic composition, and provided interpretation of the sulfur chemistry. M.H., H.M., and E.P. supported the work flow on sequential extraction of reference sample processes with H.N. and YTakano. TYokoyama, HYurimoto, and STachibana provided the interpretation of asteroidal chemistry. H.N., YTakano, and J.P.D. designed the implementation of the SOM scheme prior to the initial analysis (until ~31 May 2022). P.S.-K., N.H., J.A., S.S., HYurimoto, TNakamura, TNoguchi, R.O., HYabuta, K.S., TYada, M.N., A.N., A.M., K.Y., M.A., T.O., T.U., MYoshikawa, TSaiki, SatoshiTanaka, F.T., S.N., S.W., YTsuda, STachibana, TYoshimura, H.N., T.K., D.A., N.O.O., Y.O., J.P.D., TYoshikawa, SatoruTanaka, N.O., M.H., H.M., E.P., MYamaguchi, TSuzuki, TYokoyama, YTakano, SOM contributed to the data analysis and manuscript revision, and read and approved the submitted version.

Data Availability

Source data for figures are provided with the paper as a Source Data file and available from the corresponding author. The Hayabusa2 project is releasing raw data on the properties of the asteroid Ryugu from the Hayabusa2 Science Data Archives (DARTS, https://www.darts.isas.jaxa.jp/planet/project/hayabusa2/). We declare that all these database publications are compliant with ISAS data policies (https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/researchers/data-policy/). Source data are provided with this paper.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.