By Steven Scarpa
As it turns out, you do have to be careful when you are transporting about 750 pounds of meteorites. They traveled an indeterminate distance to land on Earth, but a car ride from Illinois to Connecticut could cause some problems. Flying through space at around 50,000 mph is not an issue, but bouncing around the back of a van could damage the material in a way that would make it unsuitable for research.
Recently, Mineralogy and Meteoritics Collections manager Stefan Nicolescu traveled to Galena, Illinois, to gather the Peabody’s newest collection in shrink wrap and plastic tubs and transport it back home. This type of work is an essential part of the collections manager’s job – ensuring that materials are preserved and protected. “It was a completely uneventful trip, just as we like it,” he said.
The recent donation is the third from the Planetary Studies Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting the study of planetary science and astronomy, with a particular emphasis on meteorites. Meteorite type specimens make up part of the foundation’s previous donations to the museum. The Peabody is one of 130 academic institutions accredited as a meteorite type specimen repository.
Nicolescu and collection assistant Daniel Drew are currently engaged in a necessary but less exciting aspect of the work. They are counting the meteorites, most of which are slightly bigger than a golf ball.
Scientific enthusiasts gathered most of the specimens in this collection in northwest Africa. “Northwest Africa is a large collecting area. And most of these people, at least when they started, didn’t have GPS, they didn’t have coordinates, so they might not have known whether they were in Algeria or Morocco, or Mauritania, and so on,” Nicolescu said.
What those collectors had was a finely honed sense of what came from space, and what did not, often just by sight, he explained.
Meteorite collectors have ways to determine whether the material is just a terrestrial rock or something from space. Checking the rock's magnetic properties is a way of deciding – space rocks are more magnetic. However, the test changes the meteorite’s properties, so that approach is discouraged, Nicolescu said. The density of the material is also an indicator, with most terrestrial rocks being less dense than those that come from space.
There are approximately 19,000 unclassified meteorites, so there is plenty for researchers to explore. It is almost certain that there are Martian, lunar, or even more rare meteorites amidst the piles of stones, Nicolescu said. “If they are collected very soon after the fall to Earth and they are not oxidized or altered by the terrestrial environment, one can look at them and guess that you have something unusual,” Nicolescu said.
The unclassified nature of these meteorites is what makes the collection so important. A key museum goal is gathering collections for future study. Nicolescu believes that this trove of interplanetary material will do just that. “From an educational point of view, it is valuable for students or scientists to learn the process of analyzing and then classifying,” he said. “It will be learning through doing.”
Since the Peabody received the Planetary Studies Foundation meteorites, Nicolescu has already received research inquiries for quite a few of them, most notably from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “These gifts from PSF provide material that generations of researchers and students will be working on,” Nicolescu said.