Scanning electron microscope images of trona found in samples of the asteroid Bennu. (IMAGE)
Caption
Scanning electron microscope images of trona found in samples of the asteroid Bennu returned by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.
Trona is water-bearing sodium carbonate, also known commonly as soda ash.
Each needle is less than a micrometer wide by 5–10 micrometers in length; a human hair is about 100 micrometers wide. The needles form a vein that cuts through the clay-rich rock around it, with small pieces of rock also resting on top of the sodium carbonate needles.
These minerals formed on Bennu’s parent body through the evaporation of salty, sodium-rich waters more than 4.5 billion years ago during the birth of the solar system. As this water evaporated, it formed minerals rich in sodium, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine and fluorine.
These minerals formed much like they do today in soda lakes on Earth and subsurface oceans on icy moons and dwarf planets of the outer solar system, including Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Ceres.
Credit
Rob Wardell, Tim Gooding and Tim McCoy, Smithsonian.
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