[meteorite-list] Some Useful Resources

[Sterling K. Webb]

Hi,

    Here are a couple of very useful resources that I don't believe I
have seen posted to the List before.

    First, we meteorite fanatics have a natural affinity for asteroids,
the places that most of them come from, the "parent bodies."  We acquire
our picture of asteroids in a piecemeal fashion.  We hear about Vesta,
where those expensive Diogenites live, and the rest of the Big Four. We
hear about the asteroids that our robots visit and take holiday pictures
of:  Eros, Gaspara, Ida, and so forth.  We hear about the ones that live
in our neighborhood and occasionally run across the road in front of us
like deer, but there are so many asteroids that this random accumulation
of bits and pieces of information obscures the big picture more it than
contributes to it.

    Here is the big picture:
<http://www.astrosurf.com/aude/map/us/AstFamilies2004-05-20.htm>

    This is one of the best web pages for its content that I have ever
seen.  It is a complete breakdown and analysis of 214,044 known
asteroids and minor planets.  It's a marvelous presentation of  an
immense amount of data in an understandable way.  The web site is French
but the author has provided it in English (the URL above).

    If you have any interest in asteroids and have not seen this web
site, you should take a look.



    Secondly, the NASA History Division web site has done the sort of
thing that one would hope that every agency sitting on a mountain of
data would do.  They have made available, in their entirity and fully
illustrated, publications long out-of-print and very difficult to
obtain.  Many of these NASA books were published by the Government
Printing Office in the 1960's, 70's, and even 80's, and when they were
gone -- they were gone. Period. Never reprinted.

    In 1981, I bought the last dusty copy of SP-206, "Lunar Orbiter
Photographic Atlas of the Moon," a book too big to hold on your lap and
weighing more than my dog, for $11.00 at a GPO bookstore.  Today, that
book sells for hundreds of dollars, if you can find one.  It's on-line.

    Available on-line are (a very very partial list):
            SP-350  Apollo Expeditions to the Moon
            SP-362  Apollo Over the Moon: the View from Orbit
            SP-423  The Atlas of Mercury
            SP-424  The Voyage of Mariner 10
            SP-425  The Martian Landscape
            SP-441  Viking Orbiter Views of Mars
            SP-474  Voyager 1 and 2 Atlas of Saturnian Satellites

    And on and on.  The number of titles and items available is quite
large, hundreds and hundreds (it looks like), and the range of subjects
is great.

    That's the NASA History Division.  Use the Search function which
works very well.  Here's the URL:

    <http://history.nasa.gov/>



    Okay, I apologize.  I'm sorry to have disrupted the current 129 item
thread on meteorite pricing, flogging the blog, and Steve.

    Carry on.



Sterling K. Webb