The newly discovered Dhala structure, Madhya Pradesh State, India, is the eroded remnant of an impact structure with an estimated present-day apparent diameter of about 11 km. It is located in the northwestern part of the Archean Bundelkhand craton. The pre-impact country rocks are predominantly granitoids of ~2.5 Ga age, with minor 2.0-2.15 Ga mafic intrusive rocks, and they are overlain by post-impact sediments of the presumably >1.7 Ga Vindhyan Supergroup. Thus, the age for this impact event is currently bracketed by these two sequences. The Dhala structure is asymmetrically disposed with respect to a central elevated area (CEA) of Vindhyan sediments. The CEA is surrounded by two prominent morphological rings comprising pre-Vindhyan arenaceousargillaceous and partially rudaceous metasediments and monomict granitoid breccia, respectively. There are also scattered outcrops of impact melt breccia exposed towards the inner edge of the monomict breccia zone, occurring over a nearly 6 km long trend and with a maximum outcrop width of ~170 m. Many lithic and mineral clasts within the melt breccia exhibit diagnostic shock metamorphic features, including multiple sets of planar deformation features (PDFs) in quartz and feldspar, ballen-textured quartz, occurrences of coesite, and feldspar with checkerboard texture. In addition, various thermal alteration textures have been found in clasts of initially superheated impact melt. The impact melt breccia also contains numerous fragments composed of partially devitrified impact melt that is mixed with unshocked as well as shock deformed quartz and feldspar clasts. The chemical compositions of the impact melt rock and the regionally occurring granitoids are similar. The Ir contents of various impact melt breccia samples are close to the detection limit (1-1.5 ppb) and do not provide evidence for the presence of a meteoritic component in the melt breccia. The presence of diagnostic shock features in mineral and lithic clasts in impact melt breccia confirm Dhala as an impact structure. At 11 km, Dhala is the largest impact structure currently known in the region between the Mediterranean and southeast Asia.

We analyzed the noble gas isotopes in the Fe-Ni metal and inclusions of the Saint-Aubin iron meteorite, utilizing the stepwise heating technique to separate the various components of noble gases. The light noble gases in all samples are mostly cosmogenic, with some admixture from the terrestrial atmosphere. Total abundances of noble gases in metal are one of the lowest found so far in iron meteorites and the 4He/21Ne ratio is as high as 503, suggesting that the Saint-Aubin iron meteorite was derived from a very large meteoroid in space. The exposure ages obtained from cosmogenic 3He were 916 Ma. Saint-Aubin is very peculiar because it contains very large chromite crystals, whichlike the metalcontain only cosmogenic and atmospheric noble gases. The noble gases in all the samples do not reveal any primordial components. The only exception is the 1000 degrees C fraction of schreibersite which contained about 5% of the Xe-HL component. The Xe-Q and the El Taco Xe components were not found and only the Xe-HL is present in this fraction. Some presolar diamond, the only carrier for the HL component known today, must have been available during growth of the schreibersite. However, it is also possible that this excess is due to the addition of cosmogenic and fission components. In this case, all the primordial components are masked (or lost) by the later events such as cosmic-ray irradiation, heating, and radioactive decay.

The concentrations of cosmogenic radionuclides and noble gases in Pitts (IAB) and Horse Creek (ungrouped) provide unambiguous evidence that both irons have a complex exposure history with a first-stage irradiation of 100-600 Myr under high shielding, followed by a second-stage exposure of ~1 Myr as small objects. The first-stage exposure ages of ~100 Myr for Horse Creek and ~600 Myr for Pitts are similar to cosmic-ray exposure ages of other iron meteorites, and most likely represent the Yarkovsky orbital drift times of irons from their parent bodies in the main asteroid belt to one of the nearby chaotic resonance zones. The short second-stage exposure ages indicate that collisional debris from recent impact events on their precursor objects was quickly delivered to Earth. The short delivery times suggests that the recent collision events occurred while the precursor objects of Horse Creek and Pitts were either very close to the chaotic resonance zones or already in Earthcrossing orbits. Since the cosmogenic noble gas records of Horse Creek and Pitts indicate a minimum radius of a few meters for the precursor objects, but do not exclude km-sized objects, we conclude that these irons may represent fragments of two near-Earth asteroids, 3103 Eger and 1986 DA, respectively. Finally, we used the cosmogenic nuclide concentrations in Horse Creek, which contains 2.5 wt% Si, to test current model calculations for the production of cosmogenic 10Be, 26Al, and neonisotopes from iron, nickel, and silicon.

The Ulasitai iron was recently found about 130 km southeast to the find site of the Armanty (Xinjiang, IIIE) meteorite. It is a coarse octahedrite with a kamacite bandwidth of 1.2 +/- 0.2 (0.9-1.8) mm. Plessite is abundant, as is taenite, kamacite, cohenite, and schreibersite with various microstructures. Schreibersite is Ni-rich (30.5-55.5 wt%) in plessite or coexisting with troilite and daubreelite, in comparison with the coarse laths (20.621.2 wt%) between the Widmanstätten pattern plates. The correlation between the center Ni content and the half bandwidth of taenite suggest a cooling rate of ~20 degrees C/Myr based on simulations. The petrography and mineral chemistry of Ulasitai are similar to Armanty. The bulk samples of Ulasitai were measured, together with Armanty, Nandan (IIICD), and Mundrabilla (IIICD), by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) and mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The results agree with literature data of the same meteorites, and our analyses of four samples of Armanty (L1, L12, L16, L17) confirm a homogeneous composition (Wasson et al. 1988). The bulk composition of Ulasitai is identical to that of Armanty, both plotting within the IIIE field. We classify Ulasitai as a new IIIE iron and suggest that it pairs with Armanty.

Experiments on a Martian basalt composition show that DV augite/melt is greater than DV pigeonite/melt in samples equilibrated under the same fO2 conditions. This increase is due to the increased availability of elements for coupled substitution with the V3+ or V4+ ions, namely Al and Na. For this bulk composition, both Al and Na are higher in concentration in augite compared with pigeonite; therefore more V can enter augite than pigeonite. Direct valence state determination by XANES shows that the V3+ and V4+ are the main V species in the melt at fO2 conditions of IW-1 to IW+3.5, whereas pyroxene grains at IW-1, IW, and IW+1 contain mostly V3+. This confirms the idea that V3+ is more compatible in pyroxene than V4+. The XANES data also indicates that a small percentage of V2+ may exist in melt and pyroxene at IW-1. The similar valence of V in glass and pyroxene at IW-1 suggests that V2+ and V3+ may have similar compatibilities in pyroxene.