[meteorite-list] Grand Opening of UCLA Meteorite Gallery

From: Alan Rubin <aerubin_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 09:46:29 -0800
Message-ID: <C9562FC27BA34837A6251166496784D2_at_igpp.ucla.edu>

I would like everyone to know that tomorrow afternoon, Friday Jan. 10, is
the formal grand opening of the UCLA Meteorite Gallery, located on the third
floor of the Geology Building on the UCLA Campus. The Museum will be open
weekdays from 9:00 A.M to 4:00 P.M. and the occasional weekend afternoon.
(Hours will be posted on our website: www.meteorites.ucla.edu ) The
gallery is free to the public. I invite any meteorite enthusiasts visiting
Southern California to come by sometime for a visit.
The press release is appended below.
Alan

Space rocks hit UCLA: California's largest meteorite museum opens on campus



(Note to editors and reporters: To attend the invitation-only grand opening
of the UCLA Meteorite Gallery on Friday, Jan. 10, at 4 p.m., please contact
Stuart Wolpert at swolpert at support.ucla.edu or 310-206-0511.)



California's largest collection of meteorites, and the fifth-largest
collection in the nation, is on display in the new UCLA Meteorite Gallery,
which is free to the public. The museum, located in UCLA's Geology Building
(Room 3697) is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on some weekend
afternoons; please visit the gallery's website, www.meteorites.ucla.edu, for
details.



A centerpiece of the museum is a 357-pound iron chunk of an asteroid that
crashed into Arizona some 50,000 years ago, creating a mile-wide crater just
east of Flagstaff. Visitors are allowed to touch the venerable object, which
like most other meteorites and like the Earth itself is 4.5 billion years
old, said John Wasson, the gallery's curator and a UCLA professor of
geochemistry and chemistry.



Meteorites are rocks ejected from asteroids, comets, planets or the moon
that have traveled through interplanetary space and landed on the Earth's
surface. The vast majority come from asteroids.



"Our goal is to make this gallery the world's best scientifically oriented
meteorite museum," Wasson said. "Our collection is by far the largest in
California and is a gift to the people of Southern California. The
opportunity to learn in scientific detail about meteorites has not been
available in California before."



The collection houses specimens of nearly 1,500 meteorites that illustrate
the scientific processes that were active in the early solar system. About
100 of these - representing a wide variety of meteorite types - are
currently on display.



These include chondrites, which contain large numbers of tiny rocky
spherules known as "chondrules." The origin of chondrules remains very much
a mystery, Wasson said. It appears they were created from clumps of dust in
the solar nebula - the gas and dust cloud that existed before planets and
asteroids formed - and were "zapped" in a way that is still unknown. The
gallery's images of primitive chondritic meteorites taken with a scanning
electron microscope offer detailed views of chondrules.



The museum also features backlit samples of a class of beautiful meteorites
called pallasites, which contain silicate minerals mixed with metal. These
specimens formed at the "interface between the metallic core and the
silicate mantle" of an asteroid, Wasson said.



"We have no sample of the core of any of the planets or even a major moon,
but many of the iron meteorites are samples of an asteroid's core, and they
differ from one another," Wasson said.



Wasson, a member of UCLA's faculty since 1964, has devoted his scientific
career to studying meteorites.



"Meteorites are fragments that were, in part, the building blocks of the
planets," he said. "Many of these are the first rocks that formed anywhere
in the solar system. They have information about the earliest history of the
solar system that we cannot learn from the Earth itself."



One of the gallery's exhibits explains how to correctly identify meteorites.
Detailed explanations of the samples are provided in display cases and
brochures.



Alan Rubin, the associate curator of the gallery and a researcher in UCLA's
Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, is an expert in
identifying meteorites. He receives samples every few days from people who
believe they have found meteorites.



"They almost never are real meteorites," he said, adding that "less than 1
percent" actually come from beyond the Earth. Some of these objects mistaken
for meteorites - including ordinary rocks, petrified wood and metal slag -
are on display in an exhibit aptly titled "meteorwrongs."



"For many years, we've collected beautiful exhibit specimens of meteorites
but kept them locked in inaccessible cabinets," Rubin said. "It's great to
be able to put them out on display for people to see."



UCLA's collection of meteorites has grown to nearly 3,000 specimens under
the stewardship of Wasson and Rubin, and is among the most extensive in the
world.



The UCLA Meteorite Gallery's grand opening will be held at 4 p.m. on Jan. 10
and is invitation-only. The event will honor Arlene and Ted Schlazer, who
donated more than 60 exhibit-worthy meteorites to UCLA, as well as a bequest
for an endowed chair (the first in the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary
and Space Sciences) in cosmo-chemistry and meteorite research. UCLA
Chancellor Gene Block is scheduled to speak at the opening.



The Meteorite Gallery is supported by UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary
and Space Sciences and Institute for Planets and Exoplanets.



UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of more than
40,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and
Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned
faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and
international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research,
health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Seven
alumni and six faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.



For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.



Alan Rubin
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
University of California
3845 Slichter Hall
603 Charles Young Dr. E
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
phone: 310-825-3202
e-mail: aerubin at ucla.edu
website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Rubin" <aerubin at ucla.edu>
To: "Jim Wooddell" <jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] What is more important in classification?


>I always want a doubly-polished thin section to do classification of stony
>meteorites. To determine the petrologic type of a chondrite, it is useful
>to gauge the degree of recrystallization (best done in transmitted light)
>and look for the size of plagioclase grains (which can be done in an SEM,
>BSE mode of an electron microprobe, and in reflected light, since
>plagioclase is a darker gray than olivine or pyroxene). To assess the
>degree of weathering, reflected light is most useful. The probe, of
>course, will give you the olivine, pyroxene, plagioclase, kamacite, etc.
>compositions. But in general, in order to get a feel for a stony meteorite
>(in terms of shock, brecciation, recrystallization, abundance of matrix
>material, etc.), I want to be able to use the probe and see the rock in
>transmitted and reflected light. I can also then probe interesting
>features that reveal themselves with the petrographic microscope. I don't
>worry so much about the fuzzy line between classification and research.
> Alan
>
>
> Alan Rubin
> Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
> University of California
> 3845 Slichter Hall
> 603 Charles Young Dr. E
> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
> phone: 310-825-3202
> e-mail: aerubin at ucla.edu
> website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jim Wooddell" <jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 7:57 AM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] What is more important in classification?
>
>
>> Hi all!
>>
>> Just a few general questions...
>>
>> The involves a mount and a thin section.
>>
>> What is more important now-a-days in classification? This mainly
>> revolves some questions I have that I am
>> not sure how to ask...mainly to those that classify.
>>
>> If you have a million dollar Scanning Election Microscope and can probe
>> around and
>> can determine classification from the geochem and BSE images, how
>> important is it to see the transmitted and reflected features in a
>> petrographic microscope?
>>
>> I suppose my thoughts and questions are possibly in reference to new
>> technology vs. old
>> technology....maybe not...but close and really deeper than just yes and
>> no answers. Not that SEM's are new technology...just saying.
>>
>> I was told a while back you can not classify without both. So Why???
>> Are the SEM's not capable of doing what
>> a petrographic microscope can do?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jim Wooddell
>> jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net
>> http://pages.suddenlink.net/chondrule/
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>>
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>
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Received on Thu 09 Jan 2014 12:46:29 PM PST