[meteorite-list] Amateur Meteoriticists?

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 16:10:09 +0200
Message-ID: <005d01cb6304$b03b0cb0$10b12610$_at_de>

Hi Richard,

I was thinking more to the aspect, in your originally posting, how amateurs
would collaborate with scientists and what their contribution to meteorite
science is.

Hence not so what they achieve in the academic apparatus, in sense of
publications and working in mineralogy, petrology ect. - as meteoricists.

But there also are some too.
If you take the early Omani years, several of those, especially the
pioneers, who hunted there and led teams, were trained geologists, (even
some working at a leading meteorite institute) and although the background
of their expeditions was a commercial one, they collected data and did a
field work, where the quality had no difference to that done by
meteoricists, also resulting in various publications.
Others, you heard it here on the list, are working several years on a single
strewnfield.

The same you observe here and there with new falls. Also resulting in
publications,
where the field work, the strewnfield mapping, the reconstruction of the
track, the cataloguing of the finds ect. is done by non-meteoricists. Santa
Vitoria, Bassikounou, Santa Lucia - with Sulagiri it was tried too, but
hindered by the local authorities - there it is relatively otiose to
discuss about the quality of the results, because in most cases, there are
no meteoricists on the scene, who would do this work and nobody else caring
for the new fall than amateurs.
Others again, also a kind of research, investigate historic
falls/strewnfields in literature and with interviews at the locals - and
find then still more samples in the field, sometimes new main masses.
(Mounionalusta, Brenham, Seymchan, Brahin, Pallasovka, Pultusk, Kainsaz,
Vengerovo, Chiang Khan to name a few).

Others again try to narrow down a possible strewnfield with the help of
fireball reports, eye-&earwitnesses, accidental recordings of cameras and
data retrieved from observing networks, some of them being able by their
professional background to do non-trivial calculations - that was, how e.g.
the recent European falls of Puerto L?pice and Maribo were recovered.

Or remember how the main mass of the Neuschwanstein was found. There a
non-meteoricist took the known data from the fireball network, but changed
the supposed parameters of the initial mass, did new calculations and
aerodynamic modeling and calculated and predicted, that a mass shall have
felt outside the predicted strewnfield - and found it in the end!

Here in Germany some amateurs installed automatic meteor cameras on their
roofs, which in case can supply important data.
And the stations of the oldest intact fireball camera network of da world
are run an maintained solely by amateurs.

Well, certainly the amateurs don't do the mineralogy, chemistry, planetology
- they are not trained in that, neither do they have the access to the
sophisticated equipment necessary for that.
And I don't know, sometimes I feel not so well, if they are animated to do
simple tests by their own.
E.g. the imagination, that someone could throw a pristine new fall into a
beaker with water, to determine the volume for the density, is a somewhat
horrible one, isn't it?

Well, so to compare it with the amateur astronomers, like the minor planet
observers, comet-hunters ect. Those gather important data for science.
Meteorite amateurs gather often data and they gather the most important of
all, the hand-tight objects of research, this branch of science is all
about: the meteorites.

And that is not to be underestimated. Not only in former centuries most of
the meteorites were recovered by amateurs, but with our desert-decades, but
also with the development of the amateur scene in other countries like USA
and Europe, you can see it from the bulletins, that these finds produced by
amateurs got ahead quite a while ago of those meteorites found by
meteoricists, like in Antarctica or Oman - especially regarding the
scientifically most interesting and important new finds, the exotics, the
rare types and the totally new materials. That's naturally, cause for
getting something like this, because of the unbelievable rareness, you
simply have statistically to find a laaaaarge number of more ordinary
meteorites, until such an exorbitant one, will be among them.
And as well as the scientific publications are concerned. Antarctica ect.
had a 20years head start, meanwhile, I never checked it, it could well be,
that the number of published papers based on analyses of finds of amateurs,
outmatches the number of papers about the Antarctic finds - and if it's not
yet the case, soon it will.

So I think, that is the most important contribution to meteoritics of the
non-meteoricists.
Also with very hands-on, if not to say trivial, advantages, which sometimes
are forgotten. On the one hand due to the regulations of the classification
process, a share of the amateurish finds lands on the desk of the
meteoricists at no costs, but on the other hand also with the commercially
traded meteorites - the costs for the Antarctic campaigns are partially
known, the costs of the non-Antarctic-activities like e.g. Euromet are
published,
these mercantile meteorites they help to save a huge amount of public money.
That is an important aspect, in times where so many institutes have to
struggle with tight budgets. In many countries and at many universities, the
meteoricists couldn't do their research on that level like today, if there
weren't the meteorites produced by the amateurs.
And respectively the saved money can be used for more research.

And that's why, Richard, you see me sometimes fulminate here on the list,
against calamitous developments in meteoritics in some countries. There,
where scientists didn't comprehend yet, how their meteorites are and were
produced and where they take efforts to ban all private and amateurish
activities.
The outcome, where that was made, was always the same fatal. A total
breakdown of the find numbers of new meteorites. And a breakdown of
scientific publications. Look Richard, Australia, was once meteorite nation
#2. Now less than 1 meteorite per year is still published there. (Here in my
home country, small, wet, green Germany, the most active classifier alone,
publishes more than 100 meteorites a year). Libya, they had better find
rates than Antarctica, since we have no amateurs there anymore, almost no
meteorites are found anymore - so they took themselves all possibilities,
that any form of meteorite science could be established there. And
unfortunately in so many other countries you will find still that lack of
knowledge among the meteoricists, where they still claim, that such laws
have to be introduced also in their countries. Algeria, Poland, Argentina -
to name only the recent sad catastrophes.
That's no good.

While in countries with more developed meteorite science, meteoricists
recognize the contribution of the non-meteoricists as a matter of course,
even sometimes honoring them in adding them as co-authors of their
publications.

Amateurs and meteoricists
Amateurs/hunters/dealers/collectors do not have any pretentions to be called
scientists or meteoricists.
Nevertheless that what they are doing is and was crucial for modern
meteorite science.
They work on different fields and it was always a symbiosis between them.

The amateurs bring the beef, the meteoricists cook the dinner.


Bon app?tit.

Martin

 


-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Richard Kowalski [mailto:damoclid at yahoo.com]
Gesendet: Sonntag, 3. Oktober 2010 05:05
An: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com; Martin Altmann
Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Amateur Meteoriticists?

HI Martin.

I wanted to add that on the whole I do not consider meteorite hunters
"meteoriticists".


Now I want to be PERFECTLY CLEAR by what I mean here. I know that the field
of meteoritics heavily depends on meteorite hunters, both professional and
part-time, to find and bring in material for study, but as far as I know, in
most cases they are not doing the actual research of this material. Now to
qualify that statement. Photographing and recording the position of a new
find is important, but that isn't necessarily "science" or make the data
point recorder a meteoriticist.

Additional questions that need to be answered to raise the quality of this
data can be what map datum was used to determine the position? What was the
accuracy of this data point? How many other measurements of this location
were determined and what were those accuracies? Is the reported position a
single position, an average or a mean of all the measured locations?

Was the find made as part of a "random walk" or was the strewn field
gridded? What was the length of each of the axes of the grid? How large an
area was covered beyond the finds so as to determine the size of the
strewnfield?

In my opinion these are just a few of the requirements that would help raise
the level of a meteorite hunter to a "field meteoriticist". I know of
several hunters that do hunt regions with some scientific rigor with a
greater interest in the data they are obtaining that what they could
potentially sell their finds for.

I am certainly NOT denigrating hunting for fun or profit. I only want to
point out that just because you make a single measure of a find's location
while gridding a strewnfield, and your data may in fact be very useful to
the science, that does not necessarily raise your efforts to that of a
meteoriticist.

Cheers

--
Richard
      

Received on Sun 03 Oct 2010 10:10:09 AM PDT