There’s a Fine Line Between Gift-Shop Rocks and Meteorites

METEORITE HUNTERS SEARCH FOR treasures from space, pushing aside the terrestrial in a quest for the alien.Alexandra Lethbridge sees their work as a metaphor for how people are too often chasing the exotic at the expense of the familiar. “We crave to see and experience things that are strange and different to us, but quite often, we’re overlooking the true nature of the things that surround us,” she says.

The British photographer believes Earth can inspire just as much wonder as anything else in the galaxy. To prove it, she created The Meteorite Hunter. The photo book documents the work of a fictional meteorite prospector and the stunning otherworldly locales her objects come from.Click to Open Overlay GalleryThe .

But here’s the twist. The pictures depict the wonders of earth andspace, but you don’t know what’s what. The rock you’re scrutinizing might be a chunk of NWA Chondrite L5 meteorite discovered in the Sahara or a bit of azurite purchased in a gift shop. Likewise, that spectacular photo of a crater might have been taken by Buzz Aldrin as he walked on the moon, or by an Arizona tourist just feet from his car. Telling the difference between the two can be frustratingly difficult. “The whole project revolves around the uncertainty of the reality of what you’re looking at,” she says.

Lethbridge spent months weaving fact and fiction to create the collection. She purchased a bit of meteorite–or what she was told was a bit of a meteorite—on eBay and humbler rocks like pyrite and labradorite in museum gift shops. She also rummaged through photographic archives at NASA and elsewhere, and combed through antique stores and yard sales for images she could easily manipulate. Some of her images are collages of multiple photos, while others have been augmented with paint to further blur the line between what’s real. “I was trying to create a landscape that was representing something that we haven’t experienced,” she says.

The Meteorite Hunter elicits surprise and awe, leading you to reconsider how you view Earth and see it as a wonderful, amazing place. Lethbridge likens the feeling to the overview effect, the sudden appreciation many astronauts report feeling after seeing our planet from space. “It’s at that moment,” Lethbridge says, “that we break out of our normal perspective and can then experience something extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Source: wired.com

Anthropology professor gives Kansas BC presentation on meteorites

Wichita State University anthropology professor Donald Blakeslee gave a presentation at Boot Hill Museum on Wednesday regarding a pre-history of Kansas.

The presentation focused on how Kansas came about around the 1590s when explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was documented to have arrived.

Then in 1601, Juan de Onate, founder of New Mexico was documented to have found one of the first civilizations already inhabiting Kansas.

"When Onate sent out explorers to document the areas of a found civilization," Blakeslee said. "They had to make maps in order to navigate the locations.

"A man that had been captured by Onate was from the Kansas area at the time who drew the map to allow Onate to reach the location.

"An eyewitness of the account from 1601 shows that a map was drawn after Onate arrived that showed houses among cornfields spread out over a distance, as well as a village and a crossing of a big river into the town.

"That map was later recognized to be the location of what is now Arkansas City."

The other part of Blakeslee’s presentation was how Native Americans used found meteorites to make tools and headdresses.

"Pawnees in 1808 were found to have made materials from meteorites as well as made shrines around them," Blakeslee said. "There is even a rock with carvings depicting falling stars near the location of the palasite meteorite impact site that is now in Greensburg.

"Most of the meteorite shrines across North America seem to sit on top of a hill and show no signs of actual impact at those sites.

"It is therefore perceived that the meteorites were moved to those locations.

"Therefore, the fact that these meteorite tools and shrines were found in the 1600s it can be said that continuous intellectual traditions occurred throughout North American history despite what some historians believe were not the case.

"One historian is even quoted as saying, ‘the only three great civilizations that developed historical continuous intellectual traditions were India, China and Europe.’"





Source: dodgeglobe.com

'Mountain-sized asteroid' that could wipe out Earth heading OUR way

NASA is monitoring the "close Earth" pass of the mountain-sized space rock - which measures 1.5-miles across - that will hurtle past the planet at 45,450mph, or 70 times the speed of a jumbo jet, on July 25.

The "cosmic close shave" comes as scientists and astronomers tomorrow join forces to demand more global action to develop systems on Earth that could destroy or divert a large asteroid, in the event one could take a direct collision course with the planet.

The asteroid due to approach Earth at the end of July, named 1999 JD6, is 15 times the size of anything else on the radar and dwarfs the three recent large passes that had some astronomers spooked.

These included the 1km-wide Icarus which passed five million miles away this month, the 1mile-wide 1999 FN53 in May and the 1km-wide 2014-YB35 in March.

Today is the first ever World Asteroid Day, backed by Queen legend Brian May and TV astronomer Professor Brian Cox, and will see events take place all over the globe including at the Science Museum in London.

Although 1999 JD6 is expected to pass Earth safely at a distance of around four million miles, it is feared a rock of a similar size will one day be on a direct path with our planet, meaning action would have to be taken to prevent the devastation that would follow.

If such a large asteroid hit us or broke up in the Earth's atmosphere, it would be like hundreds of nuclear bombs exploding and send tsunamis rippling across oceans.

Asteroid 1999 JD6 is also coming in much closer this time than the 12.4million miles it passed by Earth on its last encounter five years ago in July 2010.

In May, when 1999 FN53 passed at 6.6million miles, worried astronomers warned it was an eighth of the size of Mount Everest and a collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.

Bill Napier, professor of astronomy at the University of Buckinghamshire, said: “People are concerned about an impact from a very large asteroid, and the impact of something of this scale would be nothing short of global.

“It would undoubtedly lead to the deaths of around 1.5 billion people, we are looking at a mass extinction of humanity.

“To understand the impact of something on this scale, you would have to look to the science fiction writers, it is incomprehensible.”

But organisers of World Asteroid Day are just as, if not more, concerned about smaller asteroids of up to 150 metres in length striking the planet.

Alarmingly, a 70metre-long asteroid called 2015HM10 - the size of a jumbo jet - will skim Earth just a week after World Asteroid Day on July 7.

NASA is monitoring the path of this rock, which will shoot past at 18,600mph and just 275,000 miles away - only just a little more than the distance from Earth to the Moon (239,000 miles).

And 12 days later on July 19 a "bridge-sixed" 500metre-long asteroid will pass Earth at 1.5million miles.

World Asteroid Day takes place on the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska asteroid strike, the most recent major collision in world history.

It saw a 50-metre lump of extraterrestrial rock explode above Siberia, sending meteorites hurtling down.

Flattening around 80million trees and sending a shock wave across Russia, measuring five on the Richter scale, it would have been catastrophic had it taken place over a major city.

Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, expert in asteroids and comets at the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, told Express.co.uk: "Although astronomers have spotted almost all the big asteroids that come near our planet, the upcoming close approach of 2015HM10 on July 7 just beyond the Moon is a sign that we've still got much more work to do.

"This is not an unusual event and there are millions of asteroids this big to find. If one this size hits us in the decades or centuries to come it would be similar or larger than the Tunguska impact in 1908."

These smaller asteroids are known to travel much nearer to Earth and could even strike out of the blue - like the 20-metre long meteor that unexpectedly exploded above Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, injuring 1,500 people and damaging around 7,000 buildings.

NASA admits it has no idea where 98 per cent of smaller asteroids and large meteorites are heading at any time.

Professor Cox is certain there is already an asteroid with Earth's name on it, so action needs to happen now.

However, he believes warnings are not being taken seriously enough, and that is why he is backing the global campaign.

Ahead of World Asteroid Day, he spoke of a near miss "the size of a bus" last year, adding: "There is an asteroid with our name on it and it will hit us."

He continued: "We didn't see it coming. We saw it on the way out, but if it had just been a bit further over it would have probably wiped us out."

That asteroid flew by at a staggering 38,000 miles from Earth - only a sixth of the way to the Moon.

Former astronaut Ed Lu says the asteroid threat is so real he described it as a "cosmic roulette" and "blind luck" is our saviour so far from a serious impact.

NASA largely in agreement with the campaigners.

It has recently scoffed at conspiracy theorist predictions that a huge asteroid will destroy the Earth in late September.

But, NASA scientist Jason Kessler, who runs the 'near Earth" asteroid programme that monitors around 1,400 space rocks within six million miles of us, said: "The likelihood of something hitting us in the future is pretty guaranteed, although we're not freaking out that there is an imminent threat."

NASA believes an asteroid won't happen for a few hundred years, giving humans time to develop systems to deal with the threat.

And Express.co.uk reported earlier this month, that may include firing nuclear weapons to either blast them before impact or send them off course to avoid a strike.

Source: express.co.uk

Scientists find methane in Mars meteorites

An international team of researchers has discovered traces of methane in Martian meteorites, a possible clue in the search for life on the Red Planet.



The researchers examined samples from six meteorites of volcanic rock that originated on Mars. The meteorites contain gases in the same proportion and with the same isotopic composition as the Martian atmosphere. All six samples also contained methane, which was measured by crushing the rocks and running the emerging gas through a mass spectrometer. The team also examined two non-Martian meteorites, which contained lesser amounts of methane.

The discovery hints at the possibility that methane could be used as a food source by rudimentary forms of life beneath the Martian surface. On Earth, microbes do this in a range of environments.

"Other researchers will be keen to replicate these findings using alternative measurement tools and techniques," said co-author Sean McMahon, a Yale University postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. "Our findings will likely be used by astrobiologists in models and experiments aimed at understanding whether life could survive below the surface of Mars today."

The discovery was part of a joint research project led by the University of Aberdeen, in collaboration with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, the University of Glasgow, Brock University in Ontario, and the University of Western Ontario.

"One of the most exciting developments in the exploration of Mars has been the suggestion of methane in the Martian atmosphere," said University of Aberdeen professor John Parnell, who directed the research. "Recent and forthcoming missions by NASA and the European Space Agency, respectively, are looking at this, however, it is so far unclear where the methane comes from, and even whether it is really there. However, our research provides a strong indication that rocks on Mars contain a large reservoir of methane."

Co-author Nigel Blamey, of Brock University, said the team plans to expand its research by analyzing additional meteorites.

Yale's McMahon noted that the team's approach may prove helpful in future Mars rover experiments. "Even if Martian methane does not directly feed microbes, it may signal the presence of a warm, wet, chemically reactive environment where life could thrive," McMahon said.
Source: http://phys.org/

Thieves Steal Massive Meteorite Worth $12,000 From Australian Museum

Crystal Caves museum owner believes the theft of 12kg Wolf Creek specimen was more about pursuing an object of desire than its monetary value.




A rare meteorite the size of a soccer ball has been stolen from a Queenslandmuseum whose owner suspects the work of an unscrupulous collector.

The 11.25kg space rock, worth more than $16,000, was stolen from the Crystal Caves museum in Atherton, north Queensland, early on Monday.

The museum’s owner, Ghislanie Gallo, said she believed the theft – which police suspected was carried out by two men in hooded jumpers with white masks – was less about the meteorite’s value than it being an object of desire among a narrow group of enthusiasts.

The meteorite was only recently donated to the museum, which is permitted to display it but not sell it.

The rare specimen was discovered in Wolf Creek in Western Australia in 1973, the year before the area was declared a national park and all meteorites subsequently found deemed property of the crown.

Gallo said she understood it was illegal to take Australian meteorites out of the country. Media attention generated by the theft also meant “it’s going to be pretty hard to shift”.

“There’s a big part of me that’s hoping whoever did is freaking out right now and is going to dump it at my back gate. That would be the ideal outcome,” she said.

CCTV footage of the suspected thieves obtained by police has fuelled Gallo’s suspicion that “whoever broke in was doing it for somebody else”.

“Somebody who really wanted it found a couple of hoodlums and said, ‘I’ll give you a couple of grand to break into Crystal Caves and steal this thing’,” she said. “They probably had no idea what it was and what it was worth to a collector.

“People that are into this stuff – it’s from outer space and people have all these metaphysical ideas about properties of things from outer space.

“Who knows, maybe it was a nutter with enough cash to pay somebody to go and steal it from them?”

Gallo said she had been approached by a collector at her Cairns shop several months ago wanting to buy a smaller Wolf Creek meteorite she had.

“I said, I’m not selling it to you, it’s not for sale,” she said.

“Then we got this much bigger meteorite donated to us and we did get a bit of TV publicity from that. You start thinking about people like that and you go, maybe it’s a case of ‘you won’t sell me one, I’ll just help myself’. I don’t know.”

Atherton police senior sergeant Richard Trotter said he understood the value of the meteorite was not widely known in the town before the robbery.

“Would you know what a meteorite is worth? Because I certainly didn’t,” Trotter said.

“It’s an unusual thing for somebody to go to that much trouble to steal. And it would stand out certainly if somebody put it up on eBay, wouldn’t it? I can’t imagine it being that easy to move on for any sort of profit. It’s a very strange thing to see, to be honest.”

Trotter said no information from the public had yet been forthcoming. He renewed an appeal to hear from anyone “who might know the faces on the camera or have heard something or seen something or been offered a piece of the meteorite”.

Astronomy expert David Reneke, from Australasian Science magazine, told the ABC the meteorite could be broken up into smaller pieces and sold on the black market.


“These things are valuable for a lot of reasons, not only because of the mineralogy but because of what they represent,” he said.

“These bits of rock are usually between 4.5bn and 5bn years old. They come from a place between Mars and Jupiter and if you ever wanted a pristine part of a planet like Earth, this is where you go.”

Gallo said she believed there was “no way” a thief who had any appreciation of meteorites would break it up for sale.


“I don’t think it’s about the value. I think a collector wanted it,” she said.

“Why would you bust up a perfect specimen into little pieces? That would break my heart if that happened. That’s like breaking up the Mona Lisa and selling it in bits.”




Source: theguardian.com

Attention treasure-hunters! €10k pieces of meteorite fall in Ireland

An Irish person could be in for a cash windfall after pieces of meteorite worth up to €10,000 each fell from the skies at the weekend.


Hundreds of people witnessed a fireball streaking across the Irish skies at approximately 10.10pm on Sunday evening.

According to David Moore, editor of the Astronomy Ireland magazine, each piece of meteorite could fetch up to ten times the price of gold in the collectors' market.

At the current price of gold, this means that a piece of meteorite rock weighing approximately 28 grams could make the lucky person a cool €10,000.

It is believed that two meteorites land in Ireland every year, but they are rarely visible to the naked eye.

Astronomy Ireland have received hundreds of reports of the sighting, with coast guards in the south-west of the country getting mistaken reports of 'flares being released'.

Experts believe this meteorite, seen streaking from Kerry towards Donegal, could have been as large as a car while still whole.

"There is a chance some parts of this meteorite survive, and we think it may have fallen somewhere in the north of the country," Astronomy Ireland's David Moore told RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland as he appealed for people to share their stories of the sighting.

"We'd ask people to get in contact with us while it's still fresh in their mind. Check your CCTV cameras if you have them, a photographic report would be worth hundreds of eye witness reports," he said.

"The price of meteorites and what they're worth would come from the collectors and what they're prepared to pay," he continued.

"It is a big trade and Irish meteorites are very rare. It's a small island, this doesn't happen very often."

David recalled the last time a meteorite was recovered in Ireland in Loughlinbridge in Co Carlow in 1999.

"Pieces were found in north Co Carlow, the collector who bought some of them wanted to stay anonymous, but they were being bought for ten times the price of gold," Mr Moore said.


"However, we're not interested in the commercial value, we're interested in the fact that these are scientific specimens."

If people do go hunting in their local fields for the pieces of precious rock, Mr Moore advised them to look closely.

"The rocks might like they are nothing special," he said.

"The earth is effectively built up of billions of meteorites, but because they've been through the re-entry they'll be melted with a dark fusion crust.

"If they've been cracked open, they look like crystallised structures, some parts look like metal, other parts may look like coal. It would be like a burnt-looking rock looking out of place on the ground."

Mr Moore said Astronomy Ireland are seeking for people to fill out the report form on Astronomy.ie (click here).

Source: independent.ie/irish-news

Building blocks of the run-up to life recreated in space-like conditions

Researchers have reproduced a wide array of building blocks for life in a prebiotic scenario involving meteorites and the solar wind.

They began with formamide, a simple organic compound that's ubiquitous in the universe. Formamide has been detected in galactic centers, star-forming regions, interstellar space, as well as comets and satellites.
They then added meteorite powder as a catalyst, and irradiated the solution with high-energy proton beams to simulate the solar wind. They obtained a rich blend of complex biological molecules including amino acids, carboxylic acids, sugars, and nucleobases (the basic building blocks for DNA and RNA).
Among the products were also the nucleosides cytidine, uridine, adenosine, and thymidine, which are more advanced building blocks consisting of a nucleobase linked to a sugar molecule. Nucleosides are notoriously difficult to recreate under prebiotic conditions.
"We were very surprised to see those," says Raffaele Saladino of Tuscia University, Italy.
The ingredients for life have previously been recreated under a variety of possible terrestrial scenarios involving lightning, ultraviolet radiation,
hydrothermal vents, or meteorite impacts. The new findings expand the range of possibilities to prebiotic environments beyond the early Earth, including to the small, wandering bodies of our solar system.
The results were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


SOLAR WIND POWER
The team had previously synthesized some of the building blocks (but no nucleosides) by subjecting formamide to very high temperatures, simulating conditions near volcanoes or upon meteorite impact on the early Earth.
By instead irradiating formamide with high-energy protons, they obtained a higher yield of amino acids and nucleobases, as well as other relevant biomolecules including the nucleosides.
"Proton chemistry goes one step farther than heat chemistry," says study co-author Ernesto Di Mauro of the University of Rome La Sapienza."Proton radiation turns out to be amazingly efficient."
He adds: "Carbon chemistry works the same anywhere in the universe, and every star produces solar wind. This tells us that life could well be universal."
Interestingly, the scenario produced a high quantity of precursors for both metabolic and genetic pathways (the carboxylic acids and nucleobases respectively.) An ongoing debate with the origin of life is whether metabolism or genetics emerged first. Here, the findings suggest that both processes could have emerged simultaneously.


METEORITES AS REACTORS
Other findings have also suggested that meteorites may have seeded the ingredient for life on the early Earth, notably during the late heavy bombardment, a period when the inner planets were pummeled by frequent impacts about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. In particular, some simple amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases have been found inside meteorites, albeit in very small proportions.
Here, the researchers wanted to go beyond the idea of meteorites as mere carriers of organic molecules.
They tested the catalytic properties of eleven meteorites belonging to the four major classes—iron, stony iron, chondrites, and achondrites—but first treated the rock powder to remove any trace of organics.
They found that the minerals within the meteorites were necessary to catalyze the synthesis of the molecules, with the stony iron, chondrite, and achondrite meteorites more active than the iron meteorites as a general trend. They also tested individual minerals present in the meteorites and found that the full powder was needed for full catalytic effect.
"Meteorites are not merely shuttles for organics, as suggests the common point of view," Saladino says. "They are also reactors that can synthesize biomolecules during their lives."


THE CATCH
The findings come with an important caveat. "I'm extremely enthusiastic about this piece of work because they obtained much more than the nucleobases," says Steven Benner, an origin-of-life chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution at the Westheimer Institute in Gainesville, Fla.
"They combined formamide and rock chemistry and got so many building blocks—that's what makes this paper important." "But the catch is that the total mass of meteorite that's coming in after the Moon-forming event is negligible," he adds.
"You can't rely on the Late Heavy Bombardment to bring you much in terms of organics. Besides, that amount of carbon is negligible compared to what's here on Earth already."
Indeed, formamide, the starting molecule in their experiment, is readily made from hydrogen cyanide and water — two compounds that were abundant on the early Earth. "My view is that we have to solve the problem with what's here on Earth before we go looking at meteorites," Benner said, "just because of the amount of material that's coming in."

NASA's Astrobiology Magazine at astrobio.net

Fonte: bangaloremirror.com