Olivine on Vesta as exogenous contaminants brought by impacts: Constraints from modeling Vesta's collisional history and from impact simulations

TL;DR

This study investigates whether olivine on Vesta's surface is primarily from endogenous sources or delivered externally by impacts, using impact modeling and simulations to assess the exogenous delivery hypothesis.

Contribution

The paper provides a quantitative analysis supporting exogenous impact delivery as a plausible source of olivine on Vesta, challenging previous assumptions of endogenous origin and implications for Vesta's crust thickness.

Findings

Exogenous impacts can explain olivine presence without mantle excavation.

Vesta's crust may be thicker than previously thought.

Impact simulations support the exogenous origin hypothesis.

Abstract

The survival of asteroid Vesta during the violent early history of the Solar System is a pivotal constraint on theories of planetary formation. Particularly important from this perspective is the amount of olivine excavated from the vestan mantle by impacts, as this constrains both the interior structure of Vesta and the number of major impacts the asteroid suffered during its life. The NASA Dawn mission revealed that olivine is present on Vesta's surface in limited quantities, concentrated in small patches at a handful of sites and interpreted as the result of the excavation of endogenous olivine. Later works raised the possibility that the olivine had an exogenous origin, based on the geologic and spectral features of the deposits. In this work we quantitatively explore the proposed scenario of a exogenous origin for the detected olivine to investigate whether its presence on Vesta can be explained as a natural outcome of the collisional history of the asteroid. We took advantage of the impact contamination model previously developed to study the origin and amount of dark and hydrated materials observed by Dawn on Vesta, which we updated by performing dedicated hydrocode impact simulations. We show that the exogenous delivery of olivine by impacts can offer a viable explanation for the currently identified olivine-rich sites without violating the constraint posed by the lack of global olivine signatures on Vesta. Our results indicate that no mantle excavation is in principle required to explain the observations of the Dawn mission and support the idea that the vestan crust could be thicker than indicated by simple geochemical models based on the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite family of meteorites.