* Astronomy

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Prairie Meteorite Search

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RE: Meteorites

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Robert Macke, who is currently a Ph.D candidate in physics at UCF, recently won a Smithsonian Institution Graduate Student Fellowship award to research meteorites during this summer at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
The fellowship, which is offered through the Smithsonian's Office of Research and Training Services, will enable Macke to study the physical properties of meteorites, studying the meteorites' densities, porosity and susceptibility to magnetic fields. Macke hopes that his study of the meteorites will help give him insight to the early history of the solar system during the time when the materials that made up the meteorites where formed.

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Meteorites land on the Siberian tundra, the Sahara desert and now the auction block.
One morning in 1997, a hail of stones rained down on a rural village in China's Shandong Province, puncturing the roofs of farmers' homes. While no serious injuries were reported, some of the local peasants worried that the tissue of the sky itself had ruptured, leaving them dangerously exposed to further celestial attack. Fortunately, Chairman Deng Xiaoping was kind enough to address the problem personally--at least according to the villagers--by dying four days later.

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When Robert Haag was 9 years old, he witnessed a spectacular sight in the air above a beach in Mexico. It was a meteor -- a bright fireball that began his lifelong fascination with these bits of outer space that sometimes fall to Earth.
Haag, now 52, is one of the best-known collectors of meteorites in the world. For the last 30 years, he's bought, sold, traded and donated meteorites to museums, planetariums, universities and private collections.

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A new publication by The Geological Society of America illustrates the sedimentary record of meteorite impacts on Earth. Senior volume editor Kevin R. Evans of Missouri State University notes that "up until the 1960s, the geologic community largely regarded meteorite impacts as geologic sideshows and curiosities, and inherently controversial. Today, it is widely recognised that large impacts have played a pivotal role in the evolution of Earth's biota and sculpted the surface of the planet."

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James Madison University Meteorite Collection

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RE: Meteorites

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In prehistoric times, the Earth was hit by a hailstorm of meteorites with a belt of dust that subsequently covered the planet. But instead of killing all life on Earth, the exact opposite occurred. Biological diversity increased in the wake of all these meteorite impacts, shows new research from the University of Copenhagen, which has been published in the international British scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

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Meteorites from Mercury
Meteorites from the Moon and Mars give earthbound scientists free rock samples from other worlds. Now Brett Gladman and Jaime Coffey (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) say we should expect a few meteorites from Mercury too.

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