[meteorite-list] UCLA Meteorite Collection Finally Reaches the Public

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-meteorite-museum-20140111,0,7358495.story

UCLA meteorite collection finally reaches the public

UCLA's Meteorite Gallery, which houses the largest collection in California 
and fifth-largest in the country, is officially open. The modest museum 
space packs a wealth of information.

By Deborah Netburn
Los Angeles Times
January 10, 2014

The track lighting has been installed, the pamphlets have been printed, 
and the 357-pound metal space rock that crashed to Earth 50,000 years 
ago has been bolted to its small display table.

UCLA's Meteorite Gallery is officially open to the public.

To the casual observer, this small room on the third floor of the Geology 
Building might resemble the trophy room of a fastidious rock collector. 
But to curator John Wasson, a 79-year-old cosmochemist at the Westwood 
campus, it is much, much more.

"Finally, it looks like a proper museum," he said Thursday as he surveyed 
the modest display space. "I'm very pleased."

Over the last 80 years, Wasson and other UCLA scientists have amassed 
the largest collection of meteorites in California, and the fifth-largest 
in the United States. It comprises nearly 3,000 specimens from 1,500 individual 
meteorites. About 100 of the samples, ranging in size from a few millimeters 
to more than a foot across, are now on display.

Meteorites are pieces of rock that fell to Earth from outer space, usually 
after a journey of millions of miles. Many meteorites are fragments of 
asteroids that survived a collision with Earth's atmosphere. Others once 
belonged to larger bodies in our solar system.

Inside the wood-and-glass cases that line the walls of the museum, associate 
curator Alan Rubin pointed out a small piece of Mars that was blasted 
off the planet after a powerful impact millions of years ago. Then he 
showed off a bit of the moon that melted when it got hit by an asteroid 
before it came plunging to Earth.

"To me, meteorites are tactile astronomy," said Rubin, who works with 
Wasson at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. "Most 
astronomers can only look at the things they study from a vast distance, 
but we get to hold our beloved astronomy in our hand."

Some of the prettiest rocks in the collection are the pallasites - thin 
slices cut from the boundary between the metal core and the olivine mantle 
of a meteorite. Displayed with a light shining under them, they look like 
bubbles of pale green glass embedded in a sheet of silver.

And then there are the pieces of chondrite meteorites that have remained 
mostly unchanged since the dawn of the solar system about 4.5 billion 
years ago. Inside these rocks, scientists can find chemical clues to how 
the planets originally formed.

"The heat of the Earth messes our rocks up," Wasson said. "Meteorites 
come from asteroids that have cooled completely. Most of the rocks on 
Earth are a couple of hundred million years old, but the rocks from space 
are often billions of years old."

Visitors to the museum are invited to touch just one of the space rocks 
on display - the 357-pound piece of extraterrestrial steel in the center 
of the room. It is a chunk of the massive projectile known as the Canyon 
Diablo meteorite that carved the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona 50,000 
years ago. The mostly iron meteorite was donated to UCLA in 1934 by William 
Clark, and it is by far the largest specimen in the museum's collection.

The display space even includes a section devoted to "meteorwrongs." These 
are funky-looking substances such as iron slag, petrified wood and volcanic 
rock that are often mistaken for meteorites.

"Everyday I get emails - hopeful emails - from people who think the 
rock they have is a meteorite," Rubin said. "It is almost always not."

Wasson has been teaching at UCLA since 1964, and has fantasized about 
making the university's meteorite collection available to the public for 
30 years. In 2011, he finally persuaded his department head to bump eight 
grad students out of their study room so he could transform it into a 
meteorite museum.

Without a formal budget, the project moved forward slowly. Wasson first 
opened the gallery door in November 2012, long before he considered the 
museum complete. Even in the final days before the museum's invitation-only 
grand opening on Friday, he and Rubin were still tinkering with the display 
cases and hanging new posters with such titles as "Effects of Thermal 
Metamorphism on Ordinary Chondrites."

Despite its small size, the gallery is jammed with information. Dotted 
around the museum are QR codes that can be scanned with a smartphone to 
reveal the chemical composition of meteorites on display, along with when 
and where they were found and, in some instances, how they were formed.

Wasson thinks it would take most visitors three or four visits to fully 
absorb the meteorite story he and Rubin are trying to convey. (Luckily, 
admission is free.)

On Thursday afternoon, there were two people peering at the museum's collection. 
One of them, Courtney Van Gorden, stumbled across it as she passed through 
the building after a physical oceanography class.

"It's so cool to imagine that when you are hiking, the rocks you see might 
not be terrestrial," the fourth-year biology major said.

Some might wonder whether Wasson is perhaps being a little ambitious by 
describing the former graduate student bullpen as a museum, but Dewey 
Blanton of the American Alliance of Museums in Washington said it was 
appropriate.

"The core mission of a museum is rooted in education," said Blanton, the 
group's director of strategic communications. "They obviously have that."