Some people have cooler jobs than others.
For the study, Daly and Schultz used marble-sized projectiles with a composition similar to carbonaceous chondrites, meteorites derived from ancient, water-rich asteroids. Using the Vertical Gun Range at the NASA Ames Research Center, the projectiles were blasted at a bone-dry target material made of pumice powder at speeds around 5 kilometers per second (more than 11,000 miles per hour). The researchers then analyzed the post-impact debris with an armada of analytical tools, looking for signs of any water trapped within it.
They found that at impact speeds and angles common throughout the solar system, as much as 30 percent of the water indigenous in the impactor was trapped in post-impact debris. Most of that water was trapped in impact melt, rock that's melted by the heat of the impact and then re-solidifies as it cools, and in impact breccias, rocks made of a mish-mash of impact debris welded together by the heat of the impact.
"The impact melt and breccias are forming inside that plume," Schultz said. "What we're suggesting is that the water vapor gets ingested into the melts and breccias as they form. So even though the impactor loses its water, some of it is recaptured as the melt rapidly quenches."
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-projectile-cannon-asteroids.html
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