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(meteorobs) Fwd: "Rare Mars Meteorite Discovered In Middle East"
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From: KCStarguy@aol.com
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 11:33:57 EDT
Subject: meteor recoveries etc
To: meteorobs@jovian.com
thought you might like this
Dr. Eric Flescher, (KCStarguy@aol.com)-webmaster, Eric's Black Sun Eclipse -
http://members.aol.com/kcstarguy/blacksun/eclipse.htm -Editor,
Blacksuneclipse newsletter - to [receive], send email to
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Rare Mars Meteorite Discovered In Middle East (CNN) - A meteorite
hunter combing the deserts of Oman found a stone thought to have originated
on Mars. Of the 20,000 known meteorite discoveries, the brownish gray stone
is only the 15th identified as coming from the red planet, scientists said
last week. "We're convinced it's from Mars," University of Tennessee
geochemist Lawrence Taylor said. He analyzed samples of the Oman find with
Mikhail Nazarov, a Russian colleague from the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow.
The rock has chemical similarities to a Mars meteorite found in Antarctica
in 1984, which some NASA researchers said exhibits fossilized signs of
microscopic life. The meteorite researchers tried to keep their work quiet
at the request of the finder. "The donor wished to remain anonymous until he
can negotiate, that's as far as I know," Taylor said. But Ron Baalke, a
scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, learned of the meteorite
this week at a rock and gem show in Costa Mesa, California. "I understand
about 800 grams (28 ounces) of it will on the market soon," Baalke wrote on
his Mars Meteorite Web site. A dealer selling meteorites from Oman provided
Baalke with a description of the Mars rock, which had been submitted to the
Meteoritical Society, an international organization of professional and
amateur meteorite investigators. Called the Dhofar 019, the 1,056-gram
(37-ounce) stone seems to be made of martian basalt. It was picked up in the
Dhofar region of the Sultanate of Oman, which occupies the eastern corner of
es that attract meteorite hunters.
"Desert regions seems to be good regions because things stand out like a
sore thumb," Taylor said. See the Mars Meteorite Home Page for further
details. http://www.jpl.nasadot gov/snc/
RARE METEORITE RECOVERED
Working against time and rapidly melting ice, Canadian scientists have
recovered 500 fragments of a rare meteorite from the surface of a
frozen lake in northern British Columbia. On May 31st several pieces,
still encased in ice, were unveiled at a press conference in Calgary,
Alberta, where researchers told the remarkable tale of the find for
the first time.
The Tagish Lake meteorite, as it is now officially called, fell to
Earth on the morning of January 18th as residents of the southern
Yukon witnessed a fireball that outshone the Sun. On January 27th,
outdoorsman and fishing-camp operator Jim Brook was driving across the
frozen surface of Tagish Lake on the Yukon-B.C. border. "I was
watching closely for meteorites and suspected their identity as soon
as I saw them," he recalls. Brook collected all the pieces he could,
placing each in a plastic bag to keep them uncontaminated. The next
day, heavy snow thwarted further recovery.
Finding more pieces had to wait until spring. From April 20th to May
8th, researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of
Western Ontario chainsawed 500 more pieces out of the frozen lake.
(Warmed by sunlight, the dark stones had begun to sink into the ice.)
According to team leader Alan Hildebrand (University of Calgary), the
collected pieces have a total mass of perhaps 10 kilograms. Yet
hundreds more fragments, if not thousands, had to be left behind and
were irrecoverably lost as the lake thawed.
The Tagish Lake fall is unique -- it is a rare and fragile
carbonaceous chondrite, the most primitive of meteorites, and many of
its pieces were recovered while still frozen. Preliminary analyses by
Monica Grady (Open University) indicate that the stones are
unexpectedly rich in carbonate minerals. In addition, she says,
isotopic ratios indicate the inclusion of interstellar grains.
This observed fall is also the first carbonaceous chondrite, and only
the fifth meteorite of any type, whose pre-arrival orbit has been
determined. Using images of the fireball trail taken by Department of
Defense satellites, Peter Brown (University of Western Ontario)
calculates that before striking Earth at about 16 km per second, the
Tagish Lake meteorite was a 200-ton miniasteroid the size of a van. It
orbited the Sun in an elliptical path that extends to the outer edge
of the main asteroid belt.
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