Meteorite News- Vestan Granite 26JUN09

The Complicated Geologic History of Asteroid 4 Vesta

--- Meteorites from asteroid 4 Vesta show that it contains patches of granite-like rock.

Written by G. Jeffrey Taylor
Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology

Planetary scientists are pretty sure that almost all of the HED meteorites come from the fourth-largest asteroid, 4 Vesta. HED stands for the three types of rocks that make up the group. As cosmochemists have studied the meteorites over the years, their view of the geologic history of the asteroid has become progressively more complicated. Jean-Alix Barrat and Marcel Bohn (CNRS and University of Brest, France), Philippe Gillet (CNRS and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France), and Akira Yamaguchi (National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, Japan) have found that Vesta is even more complicated--and interesting--than we thought. ... (more) http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/June09/Vesta.granite-like.html