Abstract

Symposium Sessions

Day 1, June 10（Mon.）　17:10-17:30　Room D (Conference Room 202)

Diverse organic compounds, including amino acids and nucleobases that are direct building blocks of life, have been found in carbonaceous meteorites on Earth. Asteroidal organic compounds are regarded as one of the sources of building blocks of life on prebiotic Earth. Organic compounds in asteroids are believed to have formed at the beginning of our solar system around 4.6 billion years ago or earlier with many tiny mineral grains. Thus, their origins are also important to understanding the origin of our solar system. The distributions of minerals and elements are generally examined on nanometer scale by several instruments, such as electron microscopes and secondary ion mass spectrometers. Their formation ages and environments have been estimated based on this information. However, the origins of organic compounds have not been discussed comprehensively with this mineral information because distributions of organic compounds are generally not examined in typical analyses of meteorite organic compounds, which employ solvent extraction and chromatography-mass spectrometry. Several recent works have addressed this challenge and revealed the distributions of several types of organic compounds. We will introduce these works, including our SALDI high-spatial and high-mass resolution meteorite imaging mass spectrometry and the analysis of distributions with hierarchical cluster analysis.

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