[meteorite-list] New Hall for Meteorites Old Beyond Imagining

From: David Freeman <dfreeman_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:29:58 2004
Message-ID: <3F6A98F7.2090009_at_fascination.com>

Dear Charly,
There's your grand finale, the allende story, with the eagle nebula
poster as the point-to prop. I very conservatively pass my Allende
Slice (thanks Mike Farmer for my second meteorite purchase years ago)
for all to actually touch the white CIA's. Assigning an assistant to
accompany the slice also works well.
Best,
Dave Freeman
Meteorite Recovery Team Wyoming

Charles R. Viau wrote:

>That is a fascinating message, Perhaps the best place to give children
>(really emerging young adults) a taste for what really drives science to
>study meteorites for what they really are. Thanks for that... I am
>from Boston, and the new Amtrack Eccella (B->NY) makes that a
>reasonable trip that may be do-able in a day.
>
>CharlyV IMCA 4351
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: meteorite-list-admin_at_meteoritecentral.com
>[mailto:meteorite-list-admin_at_meteoritecentral.com] On Behalf Of Ron
>Baalke
>Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 12:29 AM
>To: Meteorite Mailing List
>Subject: [meteorite-list] New Hall for Meteorites Old Beyond Imagining
>
>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/arts/design/19METE.html
>
>New Hall for Meteorites Old Beyond Imagining
>By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
>New York Times
>September 19, 2003
>
>Spacecraft travel hundreds of millions of miles across the solar system
>to
>see what's out there and report back. Yet every day about 100 tons of
>space
>stuff comes calling on us, unannounced and mostly undetected, a global
>fall
>of extraterrestrial dust grains. Occasionally, a dark pebble or
>fist-size
>object will rain down; only rarely, fortunately, something the menacing
>size
>of a boulder or larger.
>
>No one contends that these messengers from the outer solar system render
>spacecraft exploration superfluous. But the scientific value of
>meteorites
>has indeed soared in recent years. Encapsulated in the rocks, scientists
>are
>finding, are striking clues to the origin and early evolution of the
>Sun's
>family of planets.
>
>The considerable advances in meteorite discovery and interpretation
>prompted
>the American Museum of Natural History to shut down its exhibition of
>meteorites six months ago for a complete makeover. Now the renovated
>Arthur
>Ross Hall of Meteorites is ready for visitors, opening tomorrow.
>
>"The old hall was a mishmash in concept," said Dr. Denton Ebel, the
>curator
>in charge of the renovation. "The hall was more of a display of our
>meteorite collection, organized by classification of specimen types. The
>new
>hall is more about what meteorites tell us about the history of the
>solar
>system."
>
>Although the hall's floor space is the same as before, the ceiling has
>been
>raised, lighting has been improved and the new displays have been
>arranged
>in a graceful circular pattern. David Harvey, the museum's director of
>exhibitions, said these changes should give the hall a more spacious
>feel
>than it had before. The central display, though, will be familiar to
>previous visitors, for reasons of showmanship and inevitability.
>
>In choosing a focal point for an exhibition, museum curators usually
>have a
>range of options. Not so when dealing with a 34-ton gorilla of a rock.
>It is
>Ahnighito, the largest meteorite on display at any museum, brought from
>Greenland by the Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary more than a century
>ago.
>
>Wherever you put such a gigantic iron meteorite, it will attract all
>eyes,
>so it might just as well be given center stage, where it stood before.
>There
>was also a practical reason. To support such a weight, the floor at that
>place had already been reinforced with support posts extending into the
>museum basement and all the way to Manhattan bedrock.
>
>(The museum also had little choice in its other recent renovation. Who
>could
>imagine hanging the great blue whale replica from anywhere but the
>center
>ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life?)
>
>Entering the meteorite hall, one is drawn to the platform where
>Ahnighito
>(pronounced ah-nah-HEET-o) rests. There, one's introduction to the lore
>and
>facts and importance of meteorites begins. They are pieces of planets,
>asteroids, comets and other materials from space. Most of them come from
>the
>asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
>
>Ahnighito (the name means the Tent in Inuit) is itself a hefty fragment
>of a
>200-ton meteorite that broke apart as it fell ages ago on Cape York,
>Greenland. Two smaller pieces, known as the Woman and the Dog, share the
>platform. More than 130 other meteorites are on display, including five
>pieces that have been traced by their chemistry back to Mars. Three
>lunar
>samples brought back by Apollo astronauts are also on view.
>
>It happened that in 1969, the year astronauts first went collecting Moon
>rocks, a huge meteorite exploded into a thousand pieces over northern
>Mexico. The fall of the Allende meteorite - named for a village near
>where
>the fragments landed - set in motion the current revolution in
>meteoritic
>research. Scientists who had geared up to study Moon rocks used their
>advanced instruments for an examination of Allende more comprehensive
>than
>any meteorite had ever been subjected to.
>
>Allende is more than 4.5 billion years old - virtually the age of the
>solar
>system - and tiny diamonds embedded in pieces of the meteorite, are even
>older. Formed in explosions of dying stars, the diamond grains were
>scattered through space, some of them winding up in Allende. The story
>of
>Allende and the diamonds is an engrossing part of the exhibition.
>
>As Dr. Ebel pointed out on a tour of the hall, it goes back to the
>beginning
>of the solar system, before the Sun and the planets as we know them
>existed.
>A vast disc of gas and dust swirled around a developing Sun. Countless
>small
>objects in the disc collided and stuck together, gradually growing into
>larger bodies: the planets.
>
>A record of some of that primordial material is preserved inside certain
>meteorites. They are tiny glassy beads, melted dust grains from the
>original
>solar disc, and these chondrules, as they are called, remained virtually
>unchanged since that time, almost 4.6 billion years ago. Some of the
>smallest things in the exhibition can be the most fascinating.
>
>Dr. Ebel called attention to what he called "the oldest rocks found in
>the
>solar system that we know of." These are not rocks in the usual sense,
>but
>crystals that condensed as the early solar disc began to cool. On
>display is
>a meteorite specimen containing these crystals of calcium and aluminum.
>They
>are 4.568 billion years old, he said, and have not changed significantly
>since their creation.
>
>In a circle around the looming Ahnighito, the entirely new displays are
>arranged like chapters in a book of solar history. The chapters, or
>sections, illustrate what meteorites reveal about the origin of the
>solar
>system, then the formation of planets. A small theater, where one can
>rest
>the feet, shows a video of meteorites narrated by Sally Ride, the first
>American woman to fly in space.
>
>The last section addresses the hazards of things falling out of the sky.
>We
>know by now that an asteroid or comet struck Earth 65 million years ago
>and
>did in the dinosaurs. A diorama in the exhibition is a model of the
>crater
>gouged out by an 80-foot-diameter iron meteorite - small by comparison
>to
>the one in the dinosaur event - that struck Arizona about 50,000 years
>ago.
>The impact left a hole in the landscape three-quarters of a mile wide,
>called Meteor Crater and also known as Barringer Crater.
>
>A more recent and proximate meteorite impact occurred in 1992. A
>greenish
>fireball streaked across the sky from Kentucky eastward, delivering a
>rocky
>object roughly the size and shape of a football onto the roof of a
>Chevrolet
>parked in Peekskill, N.Y.
>
>Meteorite bombardment was more common and devastating in the early solar
>system, as anyone can see by looking at the scarred face of the Moon.
>Today,
>meteorites are near the bottom of the list of life's risks. Hollywood
>notwithstanding, Dr. Ebel said, "Never in human history has anything
>really
>big hit our planet."
>
>The only recorded fatality was an Egyptian dog that had the bad luck to
>be
>in the wrong place at the wrong time in 1911. Seven decades later,
>scientists recognized that the dog has been struck by a meteorite from
>Mars.
>A piece of Mars, it seems, had reached Earth well before our spacecraft
>ever
>got to Mars.
>
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Received on Fri 19 Sep 2003 01:49:43 AM PDT