Ejection of interplanetary dust from hydrous, porous small bodies: Experimental study of the effects of dehydration by impact heating

Abstract

It is thought that the interplanetary dust is mainly produced by collision between asteroids. According to the infrared spectra, many of the asteroids in the outer half of the main belt are hydrous. On the other hand, most of the fine-grained Antarctic micrometeorites (~80%) are similar in chemistry and mineralogy to hydrated, porous meteorites. In order to elucidate the origin of interplanetary dust, it is important to understand the impact disruption events of hydrous targets.
For elucidating the effects of dehydration of hydrous minerals in the dust production, we performed impact disruption experiments onto two gypsum targets and anhydrite, hemihydrate target, and determine the mass frequency distribution of the debris from the disruption of the targets.