Laboratory for Space Sciences @ Wash U Physics

Last week, three members of our group were in Moscow presenting their work at the annual Meteoritical Society meeting, always my favorite scientific conference. I was happy to see Sasha Krot awarded the Leonard Medal — I was fortunate enough to get to work with Sasha at the University of Hawaii.

I took my three-year-old soon to the St. Louis Science Center today to see the Columbia capsule from Apollo 11, two days prior to the 49th anniversary of Apollo 11’s launch. He asked about why it looked all “burned” and he could tell from my extreme enthusiasm how awesome it was.

This is only the second time an asteroid was observed with a telescope before it hit Earth and then was recovered as a meteorite. The other asteroid, 2008 TC3, turned out to be a rare ureilite with some fascinating characteristics.

An ambitious exploration happened today to find meteorites at the bottom of the ocean from a large fireball off the Washington coast. The best view of the fireball was probably from Ocean Shores, a childhood vacation spot for me. The only meteorite from Washington state that was witnessed to fall (called “falls” to distinguish them from “finds”) is Washougal, a lovely Howardite that fell in the summer of 1939.

Interesting new study indicating that interstellar object ‘Oumuamua shows non-gravitational accelerations, most likely from cometary activity. A previous study stated an upper bound on dust ejection of ~1 gram/second based on an estimate of the coma detection limit.

Amazing images as Hayabusa2 gets close to its target!

Our group looks forward to studying the Ryugu samples when they return to Earth in late 2020. In the meantime, we are analyzing meteorite analogs to the Hayabusa2 samples.

Hello!

We have just completed the new website. Enjoy!