Tag Archives: meteorites

Across the Universe: One Fix Leads to Another

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This entry is part 18 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2007; we first ran it here in 2016. I’ve moved it to March, this year, to fit the Lenten season. With my colleague Dan Britt from the University of Central Florida, for several years I’ve been measuring the densities and porosities of meteorites. The densities of different meteorite classes can be compared with their parent asteroids, to see how loosely packed they are; and the porosity of these rocks is an indication of how thoroughly their fabric has been cracked by the shock of the impacts that shattered those parent bodies. We started with the collection I curate at the Vatican; but there are many meteorite types that are underrepresented there. When I came to New York [in 2007] for a year’s sabbatical at Fordham University, I had hoped to extend our data by looking at the nearby American Museum of Natural History’s extensive collection. But things got off to a slow start. … Continue reading →

Gems, Minerals,… and Meteorites!

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Every year, from the end of January until about mid-February, Tucson hosts the annual Tucson Gem & Mineral Show.  Many cities host gem shows, most often occupying a large ballroom, convention space, or meeting hall.  At such shows, collectors and dealers display and sell colorful rocks and minerals, fossils, jewelry, and geological specimens of all types.  What makes the Tucson show unique is its size.  As Ed Sullivan would say, it is a “reallybig shew.” Tucson hosts not just one show, but just under fifty of them, spread around various locations throughout the city.  Practically every motel and vacant lot around town is transformed into a marketplace, each filled with vendors from all over the world peddling their wares. I have come to Tucson every year for the gem show ever since I took on the job of meteorite curator at the Vatican Observatory, for one simple reason–such an event also draws in those who buy and sell meteorites.  This … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – February 5, 2019

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This entry is part 81 of 106 in the series In the Sky This Week

I would just like to say that the volunteers from the Warren Astronomical Society are simply the best! Two different groups collectively froze their posteriors off running Lunar Eclipse outreach events at Stargate Observatory and assisting Cranbrook Institute of Science with their event, which saw several hundred guests! As Venus moves down towards the horizon, the several weeks-long conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the star Antares in the southeastern predawn sky is slowly spreading apart. The Moon reappears in the southwestern sky as a waxing crescent later in the week – keep an eye out for earthshine! The Moon appears near Mars high in the southwestern sky after sunset on Feb. 10th. Through binoculars, Uranus and Mars will appear in the same field of view – you may not be able to see Uranus due to the Moon washing it out tho… The Double Cluster and the constellation Cassiopeia appear to the northwest sky early in the morning. NGC 869/884 … Continue reading →

Hunting for Saffordites East of Mt. Graham and the Vatican Telescope. pt. 1

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Hunting for Saffordites

As a planetary astronomer who has had a long career studying small bodies in the Solar System— from the dwarf planets to asteroids to moons to the rings of Saturn—I have always had an interest in meteorites, rocks from space. I have been fortunate enough to have hunted for meteorites about six times, but unfortunately have never found any. Maybe someday…. However, I have hunted more successfully for other unusual rocks. First, here is a little background. A rock in space that orbits the Sun and is smaller than a planet or dwarf planet is called an asteroid. If it is smaller than about a meter (a little over a yard) in diameter, it is called a meteoroid. If the object looks fuzzy when viewed through a telescope, it is called a comet. Once in a while, one of these runs into the Earth. As it passes through Earth’s atmosphere, the light that we see is called a meteor or, … Continue reading →

In the Meteorite Laboratory: New 3d Printer

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Tucked away in one part of the Vatican Observatory is the meteorite laboratory, where the Vatican meteorite collection of 1200 specimens resides.  The lab specializes in the measurement of physical properties such as density, porosity, magnetic susceptibilty, and heat capacity.  That is where I spend a good deal of my time. In order to do all this research, the lab contains several instruments and miscellaneous apparatus spread across the bench tops.  This include ideal-gas pycnometers, a 3d laser scanner, a liquid nitrogen apparatus for measuring heat capacity, a vacuum chamber, and more. I will probably devote another blog post to describe the research we do with these instruments. Occasionally, the meteorite laboratory acquires a piece of equipment that is a little unusual. One such very recent acquisition is a 3D printer: a Prusa i3 MK3*. For those unfamiliar with the concept of 3D printing, the device extrudes melted plastic through a heated print head, similar to the way a hot-glue … Continue reading →

Vatican Observatory to Host First Ever Workshop on Meteorite Curation

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(Press Release from the Vatican Observatory) The Vatican Observatory will host the first ever workshop on the Curation of Meteorites and Extraterrestrial Samples at its headquarters in the Papal gardens of Castel Gandolfo.  Held from September 10-13, the meeting will bring together an international group of meteorite and extraterrestrial sample curators to exchange ideas, discuss best practices, and to explore ways to better serve the scientific community. Thirty curators and collections managers will be at this meeting, representing 27 scientific institutions from around the world. These include museums, universities, and institutions throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, Russia, Morocco, and Japan.  The curators not only care for meteorite collections, but also specimens gathered from space missions, such as the NASA Apollo moon rocks and the specimens from the Hayabusa mission to the asteroid 25143 Itokawa. “The community of curators has been trying to organize itself for many years,” says Br. Robert Macke, S.J., the curator of the Vatican meteorite collection … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Off The Beach

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This entry is part 29 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in August 2004. It ran here at the Catholic Astronomer in August, 2015. Scientists have a reputation of being nerds with no social skills, and yet like actors and athletes we spend most of our careers working in teams. It’s a rare scientific paper that has only one author. This social aspect of science is especially clear at the annual meetings of scientific organizations. Obviously meetings are important for practical reasons. If you don’t tell anyone what you’ve done, you might as well not have done it. If you don’t know what others are doing, you can’t pitch in to help the field along. And if we didn’t have meeting deadlines to meet, we’d never get the work done! But meetings are also attractive precisely because they are social events. The first week of August [2004] found me in a resort hotel on the beach of Rio de Janeiro with two hundred other … Continue reading →

Please Welcome our new Blogger: Brother Bob Macke SJ

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Br. Bob Macke joined the Vatican Observatory in July 2013, where he studies meteorite physical properties in the observatory’s meteorite laboratory. In August 2014, Br. Bob became the curator of the Vatican collection of 1200 meteorite specimens. Br. Bob is a member of the U.S. Central and Southern Province of the Society of Jesus. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1974. After studying physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Washington University in St. Louis, he taught astronomy for a few years at Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, Ohio) before entering the Society of Jesus in 2001. As a Jesuit, he studied philosophy at St. Louis University. He then taught physics, astronomy, and mathematics at Rockhurst University (Kansas City, Missouri) for one year, and then began a doctoral program studying meteorite physical properties at University of Central Florida. His dissertation, Survey of Meteorite Physical Properties: Density, Porosity and Magnetic Susceptibility, detailed measurements on more than … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Tom Swift and his Helium Pycnometer

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This entry is part 25 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

  This column first ran in The Tablet in July, 2004…and again, here, in 2015 Looking over my shoulder at the computer screen, Bob Macke starts telling me about a cartoon he’d seen on an office door at MIT. ‘The first panel,’ he says, ‘was a guy labeled “cartoon scientist,” surrounded by boiling test-tubes and sparking electrical equipment, shouting that he’s discovered the Elixir of Life. The second panel, labeled “real scientists,” was just a bunch of people looking at a computer screen, and one says to the other, “I think our data point should be plotted in red.”’ I give him a dirty look. Two keystrokes later, and our data points are now plotted in red. It’s two weeks before I leave for the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, and I’m busy trying to prepare three papers. One is a collaboration with a colleague in Pennsylvania. I’ve posted a rough draft of our paper on a web page … Continue reading →

A Note on the Explanation of the D-lines in the Spectrum of the Night Sky

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When I ran across the paper that gave the title to this post, it seemed as if it would make a wonderful title to a poem, perhaps one by Marilyn Nelson or Billy Collins, about what is hidden in plain sight – the airglow, and some of the early women in science.  The moon and stars are not the only lights in the night sky, the very envelope of air that surrounds us glows, day or night.  One of the sources of the earth’s airglow is a 3 mile deep layer of sodium atoms about 50 miles above the earth’s surface. There are roughly 8000 sodium atoms in a milliliter of air up there. In fact, there’s not much air at all, the pressure is about a millionth of what it is as sea level.  Even so, only 4 in a billion of the atoms in that layer of the atmosphere are sodium.  When these sodium atoms get energetically excited, … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Fire and Ice

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This entry is part 164 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2006, and republished here in 2015. This version is slightly edited. The 2006 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held outside the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was unusually rich. We saw fiery dust from an ice-rich comet; startling images from Mars; a new type of lunar rock… and that was just on Monday morning. By Friday afternoon, I was exhausted. I had already heard the Stardust results (see Across the Universe) at the Sunday welcome cocktail party when one of the mission scientists whispered to me, “We’ve found CAIs!” (Another friend on the team described Stardust Principle Scientist Don Brownlee’s first comment when they finally got the samples: “I can’t believe it actually worked!”) These high-temperature grains of Calcium and Aluminum oxides that appear as Inclusions in certain meteorites are thought to represent the first solid materials to crystallize out from the hot gases that made the sun and planets. How did they … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Pearls among swine

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This entry is part 161 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2006 Long rows of weedy plastic motel rooms spring up in the hard barren sands of the desert surrounding Tucson, their walls scoured by the creosote-scented winds and stripped of color by the relentless sun. In winter the surrounding asphalt seas shine with fleets of cars fleeing the cold of the north. The invasion reaches its peak in the first two weeks of February. That’s when the downtown Tucson convention centre, the main ballrooms of the larger hotels, and every motel within miles (plus more discreet, upscale shows in outlying resort regions) are filled with tens of thousands of rock hounds and gem dealers attending the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show: the largest in the world. Tents in parking lots arch over tables covered with fossils from Morocco and rich ores from Argentina. Within the motels themselves, each room becomes a little shop. Walking down the hallways – or, more commonly in Tucson, … Continue reading →