[meteorite-list] Some Useful Resources
From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon May 9 01:43:49 2005 Message-ID: <427EF86A.1969641A_at_bhil.com> Hi, Here are a couple of very useful resources that I don't believe I have seen posted to the List before. First, we meteorite fanatics have a natural affinity for asteroids, the places that most of them come from, the "parent bodies." We acquire our picture of asteroids in a piecemeal fashion. We hear about Vesta, where those expensive Diogenites live, and the rest of the Big Four. We hear about the asteroids that our robots visit and take holiday pictures of: Eros, Gaspara, Ida, and so forth. We hear about the ones that live in our neighborhood and occasionally run across the road in front of us like deer, but there are so many asteroids that this random accumulation of bits and pieces of information obscures the big picture more it than contributes to it. Here is the big picture: <http://www.astrosurf.com/aude/map/us/AstFamilies2004-05-20.htm> This is one of the best web pages for its content that I have ever seen. It is a complete breakdown and analysis of 214,044 known asteroids and minor planets. It's a marvelous presentation of an immense amount of data in an understandable way. The web site is French but the author has provided it in English (the URL above). If you have any interest in asteroids and have not seen this web site, you should take a look. Secondly, the NASA History Division web site has done the sort of thing that one would hope that every agency sitting on a mountain of data would do. They have made available, in their entirity and fully illustrated, publications long out-of-print and very difficult to obtain. Many of these NASA books were published by the Government Printing Office in the 1960's, 70's, and even 80's, and when they were gone -- they were gone. Period. Never reprinted. In 1981, I bought the last dusty copy of SP-206, "Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon," a book too big to hold on your lap and weighing more than my dog, for $11.00 at a GPO bookstore. Today, that book sells for hundreds of dollars, if you can find one. It's on-line. Available on-line are (a very very partial list): SP-350 Apollo Expeditions to the Moon SP-362 Apollo Over the Moon: the View from Orbit SP-423 The Atlas of Mercury SP-424 The Voyage of Mariner 10 SP-425 The Martian Landscape SP-441 Viking Orbiter Views of Mars SP-474 Voyager 1 and 2 Atlas of Saturnian Satellites And on and on. The number of titles and items available is quite large, hundreds and hundreds (it looks like), and the range of subjects is great. That's the NASA History Division. Use the Search function which works very well. Here's the URL: <http://history.nasa.gov/> Okay, I apologize. I'm sorry to have disrupted the current 129 item thread on meteorite pricing, flogging the blog, and Steve. Carry on. Sterling K. Webb Received on Mon 09 May 2005 01:43:06 AM PDT |
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