[meteorite-list] Re: Asteroids and Meteorites (thread was: Extreme Melting...)

[Darren Garrison]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:03:03 -0500, "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly at bhil.com> wrote:

>    We've always known Vesta and its family were very distinct, so highly differentiated, and now seems
>they had magma oceans, too, 

The "magma oceans" part seems to be a non-issue to me.  After all, wouldn't an
asteroid/planet/moon/whatever that melted completely pretty much by definition be at one time
completely melted?  In other words, for it to differentiate completely and not just have a
differentiated core surrounded by a primitive crust, wouldn't there HAVE to be some point where that
"crust" was liquid?  Or am I missing something, here?

>    Jupiter's Trojans are completely outside the picture, a class unto themselves, and even Mars' Trojans
>are oddballs. Did you know Mars had Trojans?  I didn't. Google is wonderful.  Makes me wonder if somebody
>has ever tracked the orbital points 60 degrees ahead and behind the Earth...  Wouldn't it be great to have
>Trojans of our own?

I don't know, but I'd guess "probably", concidering that those Lagrange points have probably been
concidered as prime parking spaces for spacecraft.  Like how SoHo is parked at L1, and the James
Webb telescope is supposed to go at L2.  Without researching too much myself, I would figure that
someone has checked the area around L4 and L5, just to see if they are good neighborhoods.

(Edit-- I was wondering about some of those sorta-Earth-orbiting objects detected in the last few
years, thinking they might have been Lagrange related-- here are a couple of links on the topic)

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html