Dear List: My colleagues and I have a (so far expensive) means of determining the density of any object without immersing it in anything. In a poster presented at last week's 34th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, we reported that the first recovered piece of the St-Robert meteorite has a volume of .69 L. It's mass is 2290 grams, yielding a density of about 3.3 gm/cc. The volume was calculated by combining Point Cloud data from a laser camera to make a closed wireframe model: essentially scanning all surfaces of the object and combining the results to define the volume in 3D space occupied by the object.
See the (Herd et al.) abstract at: ftp://www.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/lpsc2003/full69.pdf The .69 L result was not in the abstract but it was in the final poster text and I spoke with Guy Consolmagno and others to point out to them what we had managed. Ideally you do not want to immerse meteorites in anything, especially water. They have a porosity often derived from their stressful entry through the atmosphere. They are full of fine cracks from this and may also have primary porosity. RKH ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Richard K. Herd, Curator / Conservateur, National Collections / Collections nationales, Geological Survey of Canada / Commission g�ologique du Canada, Natural Resources Canada / Ressources naturelles Canada, 601 Booth Street / 601, rue Booth Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0E8 / Ottawa (Ontario) K1A 0E8 Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada Tel / T�l: (613) 992-4042; 998-0381 Res / R�s: (613) 526-5050 Fax / T�l�copieur: (613) 954-0481; 943-1286 [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
