Nanometre-Scale Infrared Chemical Imaging (AFM-IR) of Organic Matter in Ultra-Carbonaceous Antarctic Micrometeorites (UCAMMs) and Future Analyses of Hayabusa2 Samples

Introduction: The chemical composition of organic matter (OM) in interplanetary samples (meteorites and micrometeorites) is suitably characterized by the distribution of the different chemical bonds using infrared (IR) vibrational spectroscopy (see e.g. [1]). Classical IR microscopy provides a global view of the dust grain chemical structure content but remains limited by the diffraction, with typical spot sizes sampling a few micrometers in the mid-IR range. This spatial resolution limitation is well above that of complementary techniques such as isotopic imaging with NanoSIMS or transmission electron or X-ray microscopy techniques. These techniques reveal mineralogical, chemical and isotopic heterogeneities at the sub-micron scale but do not give full access to the distribution of the various chemical bonds. The IR diffraction limitation can be circumvented by using AFM-IR microscopy. This technique opens a new window for studies of OM at ten to tens of nanometer scales and will be of importance for studies of the samples from carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu, returned by the Hayabusa 2 space probe in December 2020. AFM-IR is now a well-established microscopy technique in the vibrational field. It combines an atomic force microscope (AFM) and a tunable IR source to detect photo-thermal effect and access chemical information down to a nanoscale resolution [2]. This technique is now applied in a wide diversity of scientific fields [3], and was recently used to analyze extraterrestrial OM [4, 5]. We report here on recent results obtained on imaging two UltraCarbonaceous Antarctic MicroMeteorites (UCAMMs) using AFM-IR [5]. A small fraction of the Antarctic micrometeorites from the Concordia collection consists in UCAMMs, particles with extreme concentrations in OM, most of them exhibiting large deuterium excesses [6]. UCAMMs are also found in Japanese interplanetary dust collections [7-9]. These UCAMMs most likely originate from the surface of small icy bodies in the outer regions of the solar system [1,6,7,10]. The large OM fraction of UCAMMs (considerably higher than in the most carbon-rich meteorites) enables direct analyses without the pre-treatment generally applied to extract the OM from other meteoritic samples, and give access to unaltered chemical maps of the intimate association of minerals and organics.