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Benjamin P. Weiss
Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chondrites are traditionally thought to be samples of bodies that never melted. However, we have suggested that CV chondrites (Carporzen et al. 2011; Elkins-Tanton et al. 2011, Weiss and Elkins-Tanton 2013, Gattacceca et al. 2016) and IIE iron meteorites were magnetized by a core dynamo. External field sources like solar nebular field or early solar wind (Oran et al. 2018) have difficulty explaining the young age and strong intensity of the CV chondrite magnetization. This suggests that some chondrite parent bodies may be a partially differentiated, with a melted interior overlain by an unmelted crust. Although such partially differentiated asteroids have not yet been unambiguously identified, asteroid 21 Lutetia, encountered in July 2010 by the Rosetta spacecraft, might be just such an object (Weiss et 2012). We also found paleomagnetic evidence that the parent body of IIE iron meteorites is partially differentiated (Maurel et al. 2020; 2021) .