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On April 9, 2013 the Field Museum's Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies has obtained more than 2.2 pounds and 234 pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteorite through a donation of meteorite collector Terry Boudreaux. Pieces of the meteorite are available for scientific research. Research on that meteorite will help us better understand the history of the solar system in particular its collisional history. The donation was extensively covered by the media. The Chelyabinsk meteorites will be on public display at the Field Museum starting Wednesday afternoon, April 9, 2013.
The first scientific paper describing the almost local meteorite Mifflin that fell on April 14, 2010 in southwestern Wisconsin got published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. The Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator for Meteoritics and Polar StudiesPhilipp Heck is a member of the international consortium who studied the space rock and co-author of the study.
Permian brachiopods collected from the Salt Range during WWII by Dr. Sharat Roy.
The Field Museum has acquired six pieces of an extremely important Martian meteorite that was hurled into space about 700,000 years ago when Mars collided with an asteroid.
Learn about the trilobite, Paradoxides that lived during the Cambrian Period, 510 million years old ago.
This specimen, UC 9705, was collected by F. W. Stokes in February, 1902. It is the lobster Hoploparia stokesi and it has the distinction of being the first fossil collected from Antarctica and scientifically described.
From January 25-27, 2013 the Annual Presolar Grains Workshop was held in Chicago. At this informal gathering cosmochemists and astrophysicists met and talked about how the study of presolar grains can help improve our understanding of how stars work.
Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies Dr. Philipp R. Heck is co-author on a paper in the journal Science on the first results of the rare meteorite, Sutter’s Mill. On April 22 a very fast-moving fireball was observed over large parts of California and Nevada. Equivalent to four kilotons of TNT, the fireball was photographed, and recorded by video and by weather Doppler-radars. The photographs and videos helped to trace back its orbit to the far reaches of the outer part of the asteroid belt. The Sutter’s Mill meteorite was scrutinized by almost the entire arsenal of observational and analytical state-of-the-art tools available to scientists today.
Please check out our blogs and photos from our field work in Antarctica. For our expedition we are part of the Russian Antarctic Expedition and are also collaborating with the Geological Survey of India. Learn more at our Expeditions@FieldMuseum site.
On September 24, Collections & Research Committee Member and private meteorite collector Terry Boudreaux donated and loaned specimens of a freshly fallen meteorite to the Museum’s Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies. The meteorite produced a fireball associated with a sonic boom before it hit the ground near Battle Mountain, NV on August 23. The meteorite is tentatively classified as an ordinary chondrite of type L6.