The Oxygen Isotopic Composition of Samples Returned from Asteroid Ryugu with Implications for the Nature of the Parent Planetesimal

Abstract

We present oxygen isotopic analyses of fragments of the near-Earth C<inf>b</inf>-type asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft that reinforce the close correspondence between Ryugu and CI chondrites. Small differences between Ryugu samples and CI chondrites in D¢¹⁷O can be explained at least in part by contamination of the latter by terrestrial water. The discovery that a randomly sampled C-complex asteroid is composed of CI-chondrite-like rock, combined with thermal models for formation prior to significant decay of the short-lived radioisotope ²⁶Al, suggests that if lithified at the time of alteration, the parent body was small (=50 km radius). If the parent planetesimal was large (>50 km in radius), it was likely composed of high-permeability, poorly lithified sediment rather than consolidated rock.