New mineral, Hapkeite...
Hum,
It doesn't happen very often but a new mineral has been found in a meteorite that originated from the Moon.
The mineral was created by repeated bombardments from `tiny` meteorites and other space debris.
It then finally ended up on Earth, where it was found in a meteorite in the Dhofar region of Oman, in 2000 .
(hum, quite a lot `interplanetary` exchange of materials, has cropped up in the news recently..)
Anyway, the new mineral was named hapkeite, after Bruce Hapke, an emeritus professor of geology and planetary sciences at Cornell University in New York, who predicted its discovery some 30 years ago.
Airless bodies such as the Moon, Mercury and asteroids have an inorganic soil made of crushed rocks called regolith.
In theory, space regolith is formed by the impact of micrometeorites up to 150 micrometers in size travelling at speeds of up to 100,000 kilometres per hour.
The heat from their impact melts and vaporises metals, which are then redeposited on rock fragments as tiny, scattered beads in a glassy coating. The mineral hapkeite was made when iron and silicon was deposited with two parts iron and one part silicon (Fe2Si).
Using very precise synchrotron laser to look at the mineral's crystal structure, scientists found it was similar to the structure of synthetic Fe2Si. They also found other phases of the mineral, which would have been formed at different pressures and temperatures.
Of course everybody thought he was crazy when he proposed that micrometeorites no bigger than grains of sand were pummelling the moon's surface and vaporizing tiny bits of its rocky soil.
But the University of Pittsburgh scientist's prediction three decades ago that the vaporized iron and other minerals could condense as a glassy coating on surrounding soil has since been confirmed. And the latest evidence is inside a golf ball-size lunar meteorite.
That meteorite contains a new mineral, a vapour-deposited combination of iron and silicon that geoscientist Lawrence Taylor of the University of Tennessee has named "hapkeite."
Vindication is better late than never, said Hapke,. As for having a mineral named for him,
"I was very pleased, needless to say,"
