This is wonderful news! Hopefully one day I will get to travel out to LA
again and see this display.
Congratulations to Alan Rubin, and all who were involved with this major
project!!!
Ed Deckert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Rubin" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 12:46 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Grand Opening of UCLA Meteorite Gallery
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 [email protected] 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: [email protected]
website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Rubin" <[email protected]>
To: "Jim Wooddell" <[email protected]>;
<[email protected]>
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: [email protected]
website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Wooddell" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
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
[email protected]
http://pages.suddenlink.net/chondrule/
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