Tour of the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies collection

welcome to the center for meteorite studies at arizona state university my name is dr devin schroeder i'm the interim director of the center for meteorite studies and today i'm going to take you on a tour of the meteorite vault and through four and a half billion years of solar system history so welcome to the meteorite vault of the center for meteorite studies at arizona state university we have one of the world's largest meteorite collections that's based at a university in the world we have specimens of over 2 000 distinct meteorites and that's 2 000 distinct objects that were seen to either fall or were later found so falls are objects meteorites that are seen to fall observed by someone and then later picked up fines are meteorites that could have been on earth for a day but was not seen to fall or meteorites that have been on the earth for millions of years and were later collected of those 2 000 distinct meteorites we have over 40 000 individual pieces so from some meteorites we have hundreds of pieces from that fall were fine other meteorites we only have one piece so meteorites can be categorized into three major types stony meteorites stony iron meteorites and iron meteorites so probably the most famous stony meteorite is the allende meteorite which fell in mexico in 1969 over two metric tons of material fell so that gives scientists a lot of material to work with this meteorite has been heavily studied and researched at asu and around the world and i myself have also studied this meteorite these are some large specimens that we have not cut and probably never will because they're just beautiful and important historically the one at the on the top shelf that you can see right now is still covered in mud and grass from when it first impacted the ground so that's pretty spectacular specimen but to learn about the meteorite we have to cut polish and look at the inside and analyze the individual components of the indiana meteorite so now i'll take you over to a slice of the ending meteorite to get to see what's on the inside so this is what the end of meteorite looks on the inside so we cut and polish it with a diamond encrusted saw and then polish it down to a nice mirror polish and so you can see there's a lot of different objects in this slice there's these large white inclusions some of them look kind of funny like amiiboid and then there's a lot of kind of bluish gray material first i'll talk about the large white inclusions those are called calcium aluminum rich inclusions and those are actually the first material to condense into a solid at the beginning of the solar system so when the solar system was just hot gas and dust these were the first solids that condensed out just kind of like rain droplets condensed out of a rain cloud and so by dating these we actually know how old the beginning of the solar system was and work done here at arizona state university concluded that these objects are 4.567 billion years old so when you hear about how old the solar system is studying these objects is how we know that number the material in between the cais is a collection of chondrules the chondrals are roughly spherical objects but in a slice they look like circles and these are objects that formed from kind of little dust balls that were freely floating in the early solar system that were melted to high temperatures to where they almost completely liquefied and those formed mostly after calcium aluminum conclusions until about 4.5 million years after cai's formed and so we can study them to learn about the time after um calcium luminous rich inclusions formed and then material in between the chondrals and the calcium lumination pollutions it's a bit hard to see but everything that isn't a round little circle we call matrix that's fine grain material and that's really fascinating to study that was material that did not get up to those high temperatures that formed calcium aluminum inclusions or chondrules and so in the matrix are preserved in some carbonaceous chondrites which allende is a carbonaceous chondrite sometimes there's organic material preserved so not life but organic molecules and there's also objects called pre-solar grains which are little dust grains that formed around other stars before our solar system existed so next we have stony iron meteorites and these are meteorites that come from asteroids that got up to high temperature and melted throughout the asteroid and so heavy elements such as iron sink to the center of the asteroid whereas lighter things like rocky material float into the surface and so stony iron meteorites particularly this one a pallisite we think represents the core mantle boundary in these melted meteorites or these melted asteroids and so here we have a nice mixture of stony and iron material so this is a stony material this is an iron magnesium silicate called olivine and on earth we have olivine and it's a deep mantle mineral so by studying meteorites we can actually help learn about our own planet about how our own planet may have formed and then the shiny material is actually iron nickel metal and so the core of an asteroid we think is going to be mostly iron nickel metal but these palace sites are a mixture of iron nickel metal and this deep mantle mineral olivine so we think this represents the core mental boundary of an early formed asteroid so the last major type of meteorite we have are iron meteorites and these are meteorites that also came from melted asteroids asteroids that form at the very beginning of the solar system with enough heat to radioactive decay to melt so the heavy elements like iron and nickel sink to the core of the asteroid and this meteorite we think does represent the remnant of an ancient asteroidal core so the pattern you're seeing there the crisscross patterns is called the vitamin statin pattern it's actually the crystal structure of iron nickel metal by studying it we can learn about how slow this asteroidal core cooled this one in particular we think cooled between around 10 degrees celsius per 1 million years took a long time to cool down from high temperature about a thousand degrees celsius or more than it got up to and so by studying these ion meteorites studying these ancient asteroidal cores we can actually learn about early planetary differentiation and what our own planet may have gone through during the first stages of melting and since we cannot get to our own core on earth by studying iron meteorites we can also learn about the core of our own planet i'm dr gemma davidson i'm a research scientist here in the center for meteorite studies at arizona state university and in addition to meteorites from asteroids we also have a large collection of samples from the moon such as this uh lunar meteorite here this is northwestern africa 5000 and we also have pieces of mars this is a famous martian meteorite called los angeles and then here in my hand i have a martian meteorite this is north west africa 1734 this is also known as black beauty you see it's a very very dark meteorite it's also quite beautiful and this is the only meteorite that we know of that is most representative of the martian crust so here what i'm holding in my hand is a piece of mars crust and we've been doing a lot of research on this here at asu in collaboration with professor minaj wadwa the director of the school of earth and space exploration i've been working on this sample to investigate water on mars so you may have heard that you know these different robotic space missions have found uh traces of water on mars well this sample gives us a chance to analyze that water in the lab so in these different components of this meteorite there's trapped very very tiny amounts of water on the parts per million level so you know it's a very dry rock but there is water trapped in the minerals there and we've been able to analyze that water to determine what the water composition of mars's crust is and that can tell us about where mars got its water thank you for joining us today for the tour of the meteorite vault at arizona state university's center for meteorite studies we hope you enjoyed it and that you'll come visit us sometime in the future

Channel: ASUMeteoriteStudies

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Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020