[meteorite-list] 'Black Beauty' - the Movie

From: Kevin Kichinka <marsrox_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 12:27:40 -0600
Message-ID: <CANDn_7Fe1VzJSwaDY-68RR3Jm8hEZc_sPFHMcK0oHd+Jx2tRAA_at_mail.gmail.com>

Team Meteorite:

I have avidly followed the work being done on Mars meteorite NWA 7034.
For me it is a meteorite as exciting as Nakhla or Chassigny or
Shergotty or ALH84001.

I have been looking for an opportunity to purchase an affordable
slice, and when I realized that there were pairings, my hopes grew for
purchasing something that I could afford of a representative size, a
size that allowed for the viewing of the various lithologies, the
contrasting clasts.

Matt Morgan was a 'first mover' on internet sales of this meteorite,
but my budget wouldn't stretch that far. The value was solid. I
believe he sold out.

When I saw that Peter Marmot and Marc Jost were offering exquisitely
prepared slices of 'Black Beauty'-pairing NWA 8171, I was pleased to
make arrangements for one to land in my personal strewn field. It's
enroute as I type.

This auspicious event caused me to review again during the last week
all I could learn about what I now consider one of the most important
meteorites from Mars.

7034 might give us a treasure-trove of missing data absent until we
have a sample-return mission of targeted specimens.

7034 is the first breccia from Mars, a collection of bits and pieces
of material dating as far back as 4.4 billion years, barely after the
solar system had a physical address. The youngest clasts date to
around 2.2 billion years ago. This newly recovered assortment of
paired rocks is a hard drive of retrievable data 'stored' during the
time of monsoons on Mars. Is it an 'impact breccia'? Is it a
'sedimentary conglomerate'? (!) 'Other'?

And is it another new class of Mars meteorites?

What workers have already learned is worthy of the word 'incredible'.

If you are interested, and if you are on this list how could you NOT
be interested, please invest the time and learn about it.

For starters, a condensed review of what we already know backed with
the pertinent research papers is available on David Weirs' excellent
www.meteoritestudies.com. I've recently communicated with him and he's
updating the '7034' web pages constantly with new findings. This
meteorite is aggressively being parsed by researchers, a sign of its
significance.

And its there that I found a link to Dr. Carl Agee's one-hour Youtube
discussion of the investigative work already accomplished on NWA
'7034' (see link below).

Dr. Agee's video is the 'Cliff's Notes' of Meteoritics 101, with some
post-doc work thrown in to keep it interesting for more advanced
students. Nearly every type of lab work that can be done on a
meteorite, especially one suspected of being planetary, is performed
and explained. Don't miss this!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0njmkc2XOys

'70-34'... it's a number now reverberating in my mind like '84-0-0-1'.


Saludos a todos.

Kevin Kichinka
MARSROX at gmail.com
Rio del Oro, Santa Ana, Costa Rica
"The Art of Collecting Meteorites" - now available as an eBook on
Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
"The Global Meteorite Price Report - 2015" available December, 2014
Received on Wed 12 Feb 2014 01:27:40 PM PST