[meteorite-list] Nininger & The Vatican

From: Meteorites USA <eric_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:52:43 -0800
Message-ID: <4B00863B.8000401_at_meteoritesusa.com>

An eye on the sky, one on the ground
By Christopher Cokinos
Posted: 11/15/2009 01:00:00 AM MST
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_13776988

Meteorite expert Harvey Nininger. (Courtesy of the American Meteorite
Laboratory Photo Collection, Collections Research for Museums, Denver )

The International Year of Astronomy is drawing to a close, and it's been
marked by some notable passages. We've celebrated the 400th anniversary
of Galileo's first view through a telescope, and we've looked back 40
years to the first Apollo moon landing.

This month, another anniversary has taken place, but one quite obscure
except to some dealers, collectors and researchers of meteorites.
Eighty-six years ago, on Nov. 9, 1923, a then-unknown, middle-aged
science professor named Harvey Nininger was walking home from work in
McPherson, Kan. Suddenly, he saw a huge meteor so vivid that
eyewitnesses would remember the event for years to come.

The fireball would also change the course of Harvey's life and the
course of science. Nininger anticipated an insight about life and death
on our planet decades before it became widely accepted by researchers
and then became the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

When the meteor vanished from his view on that chilly evening, Nininger
marked the sidewalk where he stood. He knew that if he received enough
reports from eyewitnesses, he could triangulate their accounts and have
a rough sense of where meteorites might have fallen. (Meteors are the
passage of burning objects from space into our atmosphere; meteorites
are the heavy, usually dark rocks that sometimes fall from them to Earth.)

Nininger's idea was a radical one. No one had attempted to search for
meteorites where none had been seen to fall, and a leading geologist
once told Nininger that if he spent the rest of his life looking for
meteorites he might find one. The geologist was wrong.

Though Nininger didn't find any space rocks from that Nov. 9 fireball,
in the years ahead he'd find hundreds from other falls. Nininger
believed that more meteorites could be discovered from unwitnessed or
forgotten falls by simply scouring the countryside. He was proven right
on that count as well.

After quitting his $3,000-a-year teaching job at McPherson College
(during the Great Depression!), Nininger moved his family to Denver,
where in 1930 he became a part-time curator of meteorites at the
Colorado Museum of Natural History. The museum paid him just $600 a
year, so Nininger had to rely on his obsession and his wits to make a
living at buying, selling, finding, displaying, popularizing and
researching meteorites. No one had done anything like it before in the
study of space rocks, which was then a backwater of geology.

With help from Denver truck magnate Dean Gillespie, Nininger
criss-crossed the continent, from Saskatoon to Chihuahua City,
discovering newly fallen meteorites and ones that had languished in
ditches, corn fields, even attics. He proved that iron meteorites were
not the most common ones to fall, but that they were "selected" for
discovery because they look so alien and weigh so much. He recovered
1,200 pounds of a rare stony-iron meteorite from a Kansas field.

When most people still thought craters on the moon had been formed by
volcanoes, Nininger and a few others begged to differ, suggesting they
must have formed by the impacts of meteorites. He was right once more.
And 40 years before scientists would link the extinction of the
dinosaurs to an asteroid's collision with the planet, Nininger suggested
that cosmic impacts could lead to global mass extinctions.

A tireless worker, Nininger did find time during his Denver years to be
active with the Boy Scouts and take his children to concerts. They
watched the colored lights of the fountain at City Park, recalls
Nininger's daughter, Doris Banks. Winter car trips meant that Harvey
would warm up iron meteorites at home, then wrap them in blankets to
place on the floorboard, thus keeping everyone toasty.

I suppose not many Denverites today remember the name Harvey Nininger,
but until World War II he was one of the city's most prominent
scientific citizens. He was also known nationally from profiles in
publications like The Saturday Evening Post.

Eventually, he moved his family to Arizona, where he opened the world's
only museum of meteorites and where his pursuits continued, at times, to
get him in hot water. For example, Nininger didn't have a Ph.D., but he
when he was awarded an honorary doctorate he began calling himself "Dr.
Nininger," at least on his letterhead.

His love of meteorites became a family affair. His son-in-law, Glenn
Huss, took over Nininger's "American Meteorite Laboratory" in Denver for
many years. Glenn's son, Gary, has become one of the world's best-known
researchers of meteorites and the solar system.

Tonight, go outside and watch the sky for a meteor. Look for the Leonid
meteor shower when it peaks on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. And
remember that a few rare souls don't just make a wish when they see a
meteor. Instead, they work hard to make that wish real. So it was with
Harvey Nininger, Denver's original "meteorite man."

Christopher Cokinos is a professor at Utah State University and author
of "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars"
(Tarcher/Penguin July 2009).


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Vatican's eye on the heavens
By ERIC BERGER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Nov. 14, 2009, 9:58PM
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6721242.html

Brother Guy Consolmagno is curator of the meteorite collection at
Vatican City.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites at the Vatican
Observatory, will give a free public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at
the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 3600 Bay Area Blvd. in the Clear Lake
area. Before coming to Houston, he spoke with science writer Eric Berger
about what the pope's astronomers do, about Galileo and about the fate
of Pluto.

Q: What does a Vatican astronomer do?

A: There are 15 Jesuits and one diocesan priest involved at the Vatican
Observatory, and basically 12 of us are astronomers and the others help
out with administration. We do astronomy. When I was hired I was told
one thing: Do good science. We each have our own programs, ranging from
cosmology and string theory all the way to planetary science and meteor
dust. We all do regular science, collaborating with other scientists
around the world. Our group comes from four different continents and
probably speaks a dozen languages. For my own particular work I do
planetary science, so I'm the curator of the meteorite collection, and I
do a lot of physical studies of meteorites, their density, porosity,
thermal properties. And the goal of doing these measurements is to be
able to understand the conditions under which these rocks were formed
4.5 billion years ago in the early solar system, and also to give us an
idea about the materials that made the planets.

Q: I take it the church no longer persecutes its astronomers.

A: Certainly the Catholic Church did wrong by Galileo, everybody admits
that. The history of what exactly happened is a lot more confusing than
the mythology. I don't claim to know the truth more than anyone else.
The odd thing is, what happened to Galileo is sort of contrary to the
whole tradition of the church supporting science, and even supporting
Galileo most of his life. It had to be a rude shock to him because up
until about 1630, he was in his late 60s then, he had had nothing but
support from the majority of the church. The pope was his friend. Then
suddenly he was brought to trial for a book that had been published with
church approval. After the trial he was allowed to stay with his friend,
the cardinal of Sienna, and eventually go home. Those years during the
trial were just a very odd, odd anomaly. The best theory I've heard is
that it had to do with the fact that the Thirty Years War was going on,
and it was all tied up in local politics. But that doesn't make anywhere
near as cute a story as the church being anti-science.

Q: Some 400 years later there's still a lot of tension between science
and religion in the United States.

A: I think that comes from scientists who are not really comfortable
with religion because they don't know it very well; the religion they
know is what they learned when they were 12 years old. And many
religious people are not comfortable with science because they don't
know science very well. Face it, most people stopped learning science
and religion when they were about 12 years old, so they have a very
childish understanding of both: Religion is a big book of rules and
science is a big book of facts. Fortunately, neither is true.

Q: Why should science and faith co-exist?

A: The fact is, they do. The hardest thing I've had in my job of talking
about this is trying to figure out why anyone would think they couldn't.
It's a funny thing. I was a scientist for 15 years before I entered the
Jesuits, and most of my friends in the science world had no idea about
my religious life, any more than I knew theirs, because it's private.
But when I became a Jesuit I was surprised at how many of them came up
to me and said, ?Oh, that's wonderful. Let me tell you about the church
I go to.?

Q: Does the pope think Pluto should be a planet?

A: The Catholic Church does not take official positions on matters of
science. We learned that lesson from Galileo, thank you.

Q: Well, what do you think? Should Pluto be a planet? (In 2006
astronomers declared it no longer should be considered a planet.)

A: I was actually deeply involved in that whole discussion ? as was
Chris Corbally from our group, who helped write the final definition ?
because the Vatican Observatory is a member of the International
Astronomical Union. In retrospect, although it wasn't the way I voted at
the time, now that I've lived with it for three years I think they made
the right choice.

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Enjoy...

Regards,
Eric Wichman
Meteorites USA
Received on Sun 15 Nov 2009 05:52:43 PM PST