[meteorite-list] Grand Opening of UCLA Meteorite Gallery
Ed Deckert
edeckert at triad.rr.com
Thu Jan 9 17:14:16 EST 2014
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" <aerubin at ucla.edu>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
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 swolpert at support.ucla.edu 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: aerubin at ucla.edu
> website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alan Rubin" <aerubin at ucla.edu>
> To: "Jim Wooddell" <jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net>;
> <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> 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: aerubin at ucla.edu
>> website: http://cosmochemists.igpp.ucla.edu/Rubin.html
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jim Wooddell" <jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> 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
>>> jim.wooddell at suddenlink.net
>>> http://pages.suddenlink.net/chondrule/
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>>
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>>
>> ______________________________________________
>>
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