Monahans follow-up

["David G. Early" <d.g.early@worldnet.att.net>]

The following article appeared on the Monahans News website last week.

According to the article, both of the Monahans-1998 specimens will be
returned to the City of Monahans around Memorial Day (May 25).

David


Monahans meteorites to aid space base design

HOUSTON - Two meteorites that fell into Monahans on Sunday, 
March 22, are expected to yield data which will help in the 
design and engineering of the International Space Station, 
reports a space scientist. 

Everett K. Gibson, a planetary chemist with the Lyndon B. 
Johnson Space Center near Houston, is the director of an 
intensive study of the meteorites now underway in the 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration laboratories 
at Johnson Space Center. 

He made the comments in a telephone interview with the 
Monahans News on Monday, March 30. 

Gibson took the meteorites, both weighing just less than 
three pounds, from Monahans to Houston on Tuesday, March 24. 
He is scheduled to return them to the control of the City of 
Monahans by about Memorial Day, according to the current 
study schedule. 

Christened Monahans '98 I and II, the space rocks, Gibson 
reports, are in the subterranean laboratory 60 feet below 
the surface at the Johnson Space Center within 50 hours and 
10 minutes after their falls into a vacant lot and into the 
asphalt of a Monahans street. 

So far, it appears the move to a sophisticated laboratory of 
spatial material like the Monahans Meteorites is the second 
fastest scientists at the space center can identify. 

Gibson says the previous fastest retrieval of meteorites for 
study in a comparable laboratory was believed to be in the 
early 1970s. 

In that instance, he recalls, the space debris was taken to 
a study facility in Richland, Wash., within 40 hours of fall. 

Gibson attributes that speed of recovery to the immediate 
retrieval on site by a group of children playing basketball 
and their parents as well as Monahans police who recognized 
the importance of the objects for research. 

Speedy retrieval of meteorites is necessary to identify 
radiation information of various isotopes with short 
half-lifes - for example, nucleotides of Sodium-24 has a 15 
hour half-life. 

Extensive delay means essential information may be lost that 
may be useful in both space engineering and pure science. 

"We'll be able to use the information we gain in the 
research to help in the construction of the International 
Space Station," says Gibson. 

This is especially a factor in the effects of radiation in 
space for humans, spacecraft and space bases, the scientist 
says. 

Studies of Monahans '98 I and II have particular application 
to the International Space Station, a joint United 
States-Russian operation that is designed to be a permanent 
scientific base in Earth orbit. 

Currently, American and Russian scientists began Phase I of 
the operation in 1994. 

This includes American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts 
working both in the Russian Space Station Mir and the United 
States space shuttles on various missions. 

International Space Station Phase II and III started last 
year when a core module containing a U.S. Laboratory was 
placed in orbit. 

By 1999, plans call for assembly of a complete, 
sophisticated orbiter to start. 

By 2002, the International Space Station is scheduled for 
completion and to be fully on line. 

"Information from the Monahans Meteorites will help make 
this happen," says Gibson. "It is a by-product of the 
studies but they will be used."

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