[meteorite-list] Concerning Eath originating meteorites

From: v-nord_at_excite.com <v-nord_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:42:02 2004
Message-ID: <29988491.980106155408.JavaMail.imail_at_batty.excite.com>

Hi,
I have some information about Earth originating meteorites from a researcher
who collected meteorites in the Antartic:


Your idea is not far-fetched at all. Calculations suggest that it is
possible to launch rocks off the surface of the Earth just the way they are
launched off Mars and the Moon. Some of these would be re-accreted by the
Earth and would thus be terrestrial meteorites. This is based on
theoretical calculation, though, so we can't be sure it could actually
happen until we recover a terrestrial meteorite.

 

The martian meteorites suffered considerable damage during the launch event.
Since more energy is needed to launch something off Earth than off Mars, we
can expect the terrestrial meteorites would show even more shock damage.
The rock should thus be quite recognizable as being unusual, even if the
fusion crust was missing.

 

I was down with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites team. The team always
picks up any unusual rock, even if they aren't sure it is a meteorite. A
terrestrial meteorite would be collected as long as there was some unusual
property associated with it, such as fusion crust or visible shock damage.
Indeed, two years age they returned two samples that turned out to be just
unusual mudstones. Counting in a low-level gamma-ray counting facility
showed that these samples contained no radioactivity caused by exposure to
cosmic-rays in space, and thus the rocks were never in space.






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Received on Sun 21 Jan 2001 02:42:35 PM PST