Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies Philipp Heck and co-authors from the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Germany had their paper on the first isotopic analysis of sulfur-rich comet dust published in the April issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. The dust was captured during a flyby of Comet Wild 2 by NASA’s Stardust Mission and returned to Earth.
The Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies is proud to announce the newest addition to the meteorite collection. The newly named meteorite Thika, recently classified as a L6 ordinary chondrite, was donated to the Center by Collections and Research Committee member Terry Boudreaux in mid-September.
Field Museum researchers at the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies have received a second target foil from the Interstellar Dust Collector onboard NASA's Stardust Mission - that returned the first solid extraterrestrial material to Earth from beyond the Moon.
We announce a call for abstracts for the session P15 “Laboratory Analysis of Extraterrestrial Dust Returned to Earth” at the Fall Meeting 2011 of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), December 5-9, 2011 San Francisco, California, USA.
Collections & Research Committee member Terry Boudreaux donated a very unusual meteorite specimen to The Field Museum’s Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies. The meteorite is named NWA 5492 after northwest Africa where it was found. Its petrology and chemical composition are very different compared to other meteorites and it cannot be classified with the existing scheme.
About 470 million years ago – in a time period called Ordovician – the parent asteroid of one of the L chondrites, one of the most common meteorite types, was disrupted in a collision with another body. This event led to a subsequent bombardment of Earth with collisional debris for at least 10 million years. This finding is reported in a recent study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by Field Museum scientists Dr. Birger Schmitz (Research Associate), Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies Dr. Philipp Heck, and an international team of coauthors.
Right after the Mifflin Meteorite fell in SW Wisconsin in April 2010 the Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies Dr. Philipp R. Heck coordinated an international study to determine the time it spent in space and to calculate its size in space before it got ablated and broke apart in our atmosphere. Now, first results obtained from this study are published as extended abstracts, and were presented in more detail in March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas: The new results show that Mifflin was travelling through space as a small 3 feet object for about 20 Million years before it landed in Wisconsin.