Organic Matter and the Associated Mineralogy on Small Bodies of the Solar System

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites new studies on small bodies of the solar system and especially findings that provide insights into their organic matter content.

The search for organics on small bodies involves many aspects. Small bodies are believed to be primitive, non-processed objects; thus, they hold information about the earliest solar system. Moreover, the large amount of organic material on Earth, together with volatiles, would be reasonably explained by its exogenic origin, being released by comets and asteroid bombardment. In this respect, organic matter on small bodies may have favored the prebiotic environment on Earth and possibly on other planets and moons.

In the last decade, space missions devoted to the analysis of small bodies have shed new light on the presence of organic material. The outcomes included the recent discovery of aliphatic organics in the volatile-rich environment of the dwarf planet Ceres, detected by the instruments onboard the NASA Dawn spacecraft, and the large variety of organics on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, detected by the mass spectrometers and the imaging spectrometer onboard ESA/Rosetta spacecraft.

Evaluation of the data collected on these recent missions is still ongoing, and other findings are eagerly anticipated. In particular, the relationship between the organic matter and the onsite mineralogy has not yet been established in most cases.

For this Special Issue, we invite recent advances in the study of small bodies’ mineralogy and organic matter content in an effort to better understand the survival of such organic matter, its composition, and its relations to the mineralogy.

Fresh findings from the current space missions devoted to the study of asteroids and Kuiper belt objects (OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa 2, New Horizons) are also welcome.

Insights into the following aspects will be greatly appreciated:

• Evolution of organic matter and its relationship with salts, clays, and volatiles;
• Effect of hydrothermal alteration on the organic and mineral content;
• Existence of a past ocean world;
• Insight into the abundance and composition of organic matter;
• Physical properties of the regolith rich in organic matter (e.g., grain size, porosity, albedo);
• Geological context and evolution scenarios of organic-rich terrains;
• Connection between the outgassing environment and surface composition;
• Space weather and physical processes altering the surface composition.

Dr. Vassilissa Vinogradoff
Dr. Andrea Raponi
Guest Editors

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