[meteorite-list] Provenance of Universities' Material

From: Jeff Grossman <jngrossman_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:56:03 -0500
Message-ID: <4F160A93.6010003_at_gmail.com>

Erik,

This would be a nearly impossible exercise to do. What I can say is
this: There are 29050 classified Antarctic meteorites in the world's
colletions, and 12664 classified non-Antarctic meteorites. If we assume
that all of the Antarctics are government-collected and most of the
non-Antarctics are privately collected, then by number of named
meteorites, ~30% were privately collected. If you do it by mass, it is
all dominated by the large irons, and then you have to worry about who
collected each one. If you do it by numbers of individual specimens, I
have no idea... this tends to bias the answer toward observed large
showers like Holbrook.

Tens of thousands of desert meteorites, especially NWAs, are
unclassified, and will not be classified any time soon. But these tend
not to be "acquired material [in] universities and museums." So we
probably don't have to count all of them (even if we could). But there
are nearly 9000 unclassified Antarctic meteorites in institutional
collections which might be counted.

Jeff


On 1/17/2012 3:59 PM, Erik Fisler wrote:
> Hello List again,
> I was pondering the posts from "University Experience" and the very exciting posts on the new lunar material along with an announcement from ASU's School of Space Exploration's new acquisition of the 349g main mass from the Tissint fall today.
> This brings up an interesting question to my mind;
> What percentage of acquired material Universities and museums around the world posses have been recovered by private hunters. (not by government or university or museum field groups or Antarctican hunts.)
> Surely the percentage must be within 98-99% ????
>
> [Erik]
>
> Sent from my iPod
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Received on Tue 17 Jan 2012 06:56:03 PM PST