Delivery Of Water And Volatiles To The Terrestrial Planets And The Moon

From modeling the evolution of disks of planetesimals under the influence of planets, it has been shown that the mass of water delivered to the Earth from beyond Jupiter’s orbit could be comparable to the mass of terrestrial oceans.

A considerable portion of the water could have been delivered to the Earth’s embryo, when its mass was smaller than the current mass of the Earth. While the Earth’s embryo mass was growing to half the current mass of the Earth, the mass of water delivered to the embryo could be near 30% of the total amount of water delivered to the Earth from the feeding zone of Jupiter and Saturn. Water of the terrestrial oceans could be a result of mixing the water from several sources with higher and lower D/H ratios.

The mass of water delivered to Venus from beyond Jupiter’s orbit was almost the same as that for the Earth, if normalized to unit mass of the planet. The analogous per-unit mass of water delivered to Mars was two-three times as much as that for the Earth. The mass of water delivered to the Moon from beyond Jupiter’s orbit could be less than that for the Earth by a factor not more than 20.

M. Ya. Marov, S. I. Ipatov
(Submitted on 22 Mar 2020)

Comments: 9 pages
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Journal reference: Solar System Research, 2018, v. 52, N 5, p. 392-400
DOI: 10.1134/S0038094618050052
Cite as: arXiv:2003.09982 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2003.09982v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Sergei Ipatov
[v1] Sun, 22 Mar 2020 20:08:20 UTC (491 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09982
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry