[meteorite-list] Millions Of Pennies From Heaven

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:20 2004
Message-ID: <200310021803.LAA12729_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/106510888851640.xml

Millions of pennies from heaven

Meteorite may bring out-of-world payday

By Mark Schleifstein
nola.com (Louisiana)
October 2, 2003

The ugly chunk of tan rock that crashed through the Uptown home of Roy Fausset on
Sept. 23 was an astronomical event in more ways than one.

No sooner had Tulane University geologist Stephen Nelson declared the rock a
meteorite than offers began pouring in to buy pieces of it at sky-high prices: $25,000
to $50,000 a chunk.

Scientists, though less readily able to bring such large sums of
money to bear, also want to study pieces of the rock to look
for clues about the beginning of the universe some 4.6 billion
years ago.

Among collectors, however, a much younger rock would be
worth more. If examination determines it's a mere 200
million years old and contains a specific mix of minerals and
chemicals, the meteorite may have originated from Mars, said
Tracy Gregg, a geology professor at the State University of New
York-Buffalo and chair of the Geological Society of America's planetary geology
division.

"The worth of a meteorite is like any other precious stone," Gregg said. "It's related
to scarcity, and the ones worth the most are those that came from Mars."

The going rate for a Mars rock? $1,500 per gram. Fausset's weighs well over a
pound, or more than 450 grams.

At that rate, a troy ounce of a Mars meteorite would be worth $46,500, or about 120
times the price of pure gold at Wednesday's prices on the commodities exchange.

Even if not from Mars, the pieces could be worth a small fortune, collectors say.

That's why Fausset's find has been moved into a secure storage facility, he said. The
idea that a rock could be that valuable got him thinking about security quickly.

"But whether it came from Mars or dates back to the beginning of our solar system,
it's a fascinating piece of rock that tells an incredible story," Gregg said.

Trade in meteorite chunks has skyrocketed in recent years, in part thanks to the
Internet, said Matt Morgan, a full-time geologist with the Colorado Geological
Survey and a part-time trader.

On his Mile High Meteorites Web site, Morgan is offering tiny pieces of his varied
collection for thousands of dollars.

For instance, a 2.294-gram fragment of a meteorite found in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, in 1979 sells for $11,470.

"I always wanted a piece of a meteorite, even when I was a child," Morgan said.

Robert Wesel of Hillsboro, Ore., got hooked after buying a meteorite fragment at the
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

"At the time, I had no idea that people could own such a thing," said Wesel, a
registered nurse.

Then he went to a gem show and discovered a kiosk selling meteorites.

"I think I spent about $4,000 with that guy on the spot, and that's what really
launched it," he said. "I walked away with a price list . . . and later bought more
pieces. Then I got a computer, and in 1998 I found eBay."

Word of meteorite finds travels quickly among dealers, he said.

"You need to keep an ear to the ground, and if you hear something, you try to ally
yourself with someone in the area or go there yourself," he said.

In March, he heard about a meteorite strike in a Chicago suburb and, learning that
pieces of the meteorite were strewn through a large neighborhood, drove there to
scavenge.

"Everybody who collects does it for a different reason," he said. "Some collect on a
map, one sample from every country. Others are trying to get an A-to-Z collection of
different types of meteorites."

Often, pieces of meteorites end up in museum collections, despite their inability to
match the prices paid by private collectors, said Denton Ebel, a curator with the new
Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City.

The museum has more than 120 meteorites on display, and more than 1,250 in its
collection.

Samples in the collection are carefully analyzed to ensure they are meteorites and to
attempt to determine their origin.

A 30-micron-thick slice, as thin as a human hair, is cut off a sample and viewed
through a scanning electron microscope to determine the texture of the rock crystals.
Then it's examined with other instruments to find out its chemical composition.

On the outside of most meteorites is a thin layer of black material known as a fusion
crust.

"It's essentially glass," Ebel said, the result of the outer layer of the rock melting as
it enters Earth's atmosphere.

On rare occasions, eyewitnesses can provide enough evidence to determine a
meteorite's probable track through space.

"Seven or eight meteorite falls on Earth have been witnessed and photographed in
such a way that their orbits could be traced backward, and they tend to come from the
asteroid belt," he said, referring to the band of rocks circling the sun in the wide space
between Mars and Jupiter.

Jupiter's gravity is so intense that it ejects some of the rocks into deep space outside
this solar system, or into the inner part of the solar system toward Earth. A
meteorite is the name given to one of those pieces when it falls to Earth's surface.

The asteroids are believed to be the remains of small proto-planets -- collections of
matter that fused together at the creation of this solar system, 4.6 billion years ago.
They stayed together long enough for their gravity to have melted the heavier
elements, such as iron, which sank into their centers. Lighter elements formed a rock
mantle on the surface.

Over the next 40 million years, these orbs were pulled apart, probably by the
gravitational force of Jupiter or by collisions with other asteroids.

On rare occasions, a wayward asteroid would hit the surface of Mars at just the right
angle, about 15 degrees, to blast a piece of that planet's surface into space at the
speed necessary to escape Mars' gravitational pull, Gregg said.

Recent research indicates that places where that has happened on Mars have been
where relatively young surface formations are found.

When scientists have broken open microscopic bubbles inside Martian meteorites,
they've found a mix of gases that have matched those collected from the planet's
surface in 1976 by NASA's Viking landers.

Fausset has sent a small sample of his find to a laboratory to determine what kind of
meteorite it is.

Nelson's initial analysis indicates it contains a mixture of minerals -- olivine,
pyroxene, plagioclase and troilite -- often found in "stony meteorites" called
chondrites that hail from the asteroid belt, Ebel said.

Such a rock would be older than any rock found on Earth, Gregg said. That's because
the Earth's surface has been changing since it was formed: Water has eroded its
surface, and the continents have actually been sucked back into the center of the
Earth along the underwater edges of the huge tectonic plates on which the continents
have been built. New rock has been formed through volcanic action, replacing the
older material.

"We just don't have such old surfaces left on Earth," she said.

. . . . . . .

Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein_at_timespicayune.com or (504)
826-3327.
Received on Thu 02 Oct 2003 02:03:25 PM PDT