Video: Inside the Smithsonian's squeaky-clean meteorite lab  The
Smithsonian collects a lot of things — from Fonzie's jacket to
ancient Chinese pottery. It turns out it also collects and
studies meteorites in a sanitized facility outside of
Washington, DC. The team there preserves an ultra-clean
environment to prevent contamination while analyzing space rocks
harvested from Antarctica.  The Antarctic Meteorite Program's
lab staff don protective gear and work with the rocks in
vacuumed-sealed containers accessed by gloves from the outside.
The meteorites are even held in dry nitrogen storage to prevent
any moisture from compromising the samples.  In fact, the
Smithsonian's clean room is modeled after the Lunar Processing
Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
That's pretty clean. So, why all the neat-freak fuss?  There's a
wealth of information in the pristine samples coming from
Antarctica. Understanding how other objects in space formed
helps scientists conjecture about how our own pla