Laboratory for Space Sciences @ Wash U Physics

A conversation with two award-winning space scientists.

This is from Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Apparently a meteorite fell near a baby near The Wind in the Willows. I hope it is a CH3 chondrite!

Fourth floor friend Seth Wood wrote this nice article for Wash U’s Ampesand about some of the work we do up here.

It was exciting to watch O-REX gather a sample from asteroid Bennu. One way OREX will determine how much sample was collected is by spinning the spacecraft and calculating the change in its moment of inertia before and after collection — a great basic physics experiment that I use as an example in my introductory physics class. The PI of OREX, Dr. Lauretta, got his Ph.D. at Wash U working with Dr. Fegley in EPS!

Backscattered electron mosaic of the CH3 chondrite Acfer 182. This is a big one: ~160 gigapixels.

Very cool new paper on the discovery of chunks of asteroid Vesta on asteroid Bennu.

Our recent paper showed that pieces of carbonaceous-chondrite-like micrometeoroids bombarded Vesta’s regolith.

We should look through the carbonaceous chondrite multi-gigapixel BSE mosaics for clasts of HED-like material.

Lionel is a co-author on this interesting new paper in Science on the origin of Earth’s water. Enstatite chondrites were previously thought to be a building block of Earth because they match in various isotopes systems, most importantly oxygen. This work shows that the ECs can also bring plenty of water to Earth, and EC water has a deuterium abundance that matches Earth’s primordial water composition. Fascinating work that leads to lots more questions!

The Leonard Medal from the Meteoritical Society, the top prize in our field for contributions to meteoritics, was awarded to Wash U’s Katharina Lodders for 2021. It’s hard to overstate Katharina’s contributions to cosmochemistry. Her papers on the Solar System abundances are the most cited works in our field. Though her official affiliation is with Earth & Planetary Science, I consider her a part of our department too as she’s been a long-time collaborator with us and other research groups in physics. I’ve benefited personally from Katharina’s enormous expertise across planetary science and astrophysics — she is always willing to talk and guide me in the right direction on a new research question.

With both the Leonard Medal and Nier Prize for 2021, by Katharina and Nan, Wash U is clearly a world-leading institution in meteoritics and cosmochemistry.

Congratulations to Nan! The Nier Prize is awarded to outstanding research in meteoritics and closely allied fields by scientists under the age of 35. Nan is much deserving of this award for her contributions to the study of presolar grains. We’re all very proud of her!

This is a backscattered electron image mosaic of Dominion Range 14359, collected by the ANSMET crew in Antarctica in 2014.