Movie of the meteorite EET 87503 depicts overlay of X-ray and neutron imaging. Purple and orange denote two different classes of iron-rich minerals; green denotes minerals that contain water in their structure.
Credit: NIST
Each year, hundreds of meteorites — rocky bodies left over from the formation of the solar system — bombard Earth, delivering minerals, metals and water to our planet. Analyzing the crevices and mineral-rich deposits inside meteorites not only reveals the early history of planet formation but may provide clues about how the young Earth acquired water and other ingredients essential for life.
Now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have combined two complementary techniques — X-ray imaging and neutron imaging — to peer inside these rocky remnants.
Neutron imaging is ideal for searching for water and other hydrogen-bearing compounds because neutrons readily ricochet off hydrogen. In contrast, X-ray imaging is best for finding deposits of heavy elements, such as iron and nickel, because X-rays are primarily scattered by the large number of electrons in heavy-weight atoms.
Neither imaging technique significantly harms or alters meteorites, unlike other methods of analyzing the chemical composition of the rocks, which require cutting thin slices of the meteorites. Although each imaging method has been used separately in the past, the team is among the first to use the two techniques simultaneously to create X-ray and neutron-beam snapshots.
In their pilot study, the scientists examined two meteorites whose mineral and water content were already well known so that they could assess the accuracy of the combined imaging methods. One of the rocks, dubbed EET 87503, is a fragment from the s ..
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