We’ve now had three days searching, finding, and collecting meteorites. We have seven more from this afternoon, and found several others this morning in our “home” moraine. Today was windy, around 15-20 mph, which made it very cold and hard to collect the meteorites. But we persevere because we are all invested in finding as many of these little space gems as we can. Why? Because they are samples of other worlds. Most of what we find are called chondrites, named that because they contain chondrules, which are tine, millimeter-sized spheres of mineral that formed in the very very early solar system, before planets were born. Chondrites are pieces of planets that never formed, containing the stuff of our solar nebula. Some chondrites contain water and organic building blocks, others contain tiny grains left over from ancient supernovae. Chondrites now reside in our asteroid belt before they are delivered to Earth. A few of what we find are achondrites, simply meaning: not a chondrite. Achondrites are from solar system bodies that either were, or still are, planetary – and here I mean they had a crust, a mantle, and a core. Some are from large asteroids that were broken up, so we get iron meteorites from the cores of those bodies. Some are from large asteroids, like Vesta, and some are from the Moon and Mars. It requires detailed laboratory analyses, and sometimes years of research, to determine where an achondrite is from (and many we still don’t know!), so we don’t even attempt to do that in the field. We just collect them all and send them home, where the team at the Johnson Space Center and the Smithsonian institute will classify them. Since we can’t send missions to collect samples from everywhere in the solar system, we rely on meteorites to deliver to solar system to us.
-posted by Barbara (editing by rph)
p.s. To all my postcard friends, I have not forgotten you! Postcards are sitting in my tent, we haven’t had a chance to send them to McMurdo.
To Renee, Zheng-Hua, and Scott: happy holidays and thanks for the messages!
To R: R’lyeh!