Searching for cometary volatile signatures in primitive carbonaceous chondrites

The solar system formed from the collapse of a cloud of interstellar gas and dust ~4.6 billion years ago. The violent nature of planetary accretion modified the composition of the original planetary building blocks, erasing much of the record of the material that made up the early solar system. However, some primitive grains of dust and ice survived accretion and were later incorporated into primitive comets and asteroids. By Identifying and characterising the chemical composition of these primitive grains we aim to provide new insights into the chemical makeup of the interstellar material that comprised the early solar system and better reconstruct the processes that resulted in the distribution of volatile elements, including water, throughout the solar system potentially making Earth the habitable planet we know today.
 
Comets are balls of dust and ice that formed in the deep outer solar system. As such, they are made up of some of the most pristine material left over from the formation of our solar system. However, because comets are essentially made up of ice and loosely packed dust, they are destroyed when they enter our atmosphere. Our understanding about the composition of comets is therefore primarily from material returned from comet 81P/Wild 2 by the NASA Stardust mission, and from the ESA Rosetta mission which visited and measured the cloud of ice and dust surrounding comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The composition of volatile elements including oxygen and the noble gases measured within these two comets was found to be distinct from the composition of the Sun, which makes up more than 99.9% of all the matter in our solar system. Comets are therefore likely made up of material inherited from the cloud of interstellar gas and dust that existed before the formation of the solar system. Comets therefore witnessed the birth of the solar system and If only we could get our hands on cometary material, it could provide us with a record of how our solar...