Laboratory for Space Sciences @ Wash U Physics

I’ve added a page that will feature some ~billion-pixel images of meteorites I’ve taken with electron and optical microscopes using this or this technique. The first one is a classic: Renazzo, the type sample of the CR chondrites. Renazzo fell in Italy in 1824 with a total mass of 1 kg. Check it out!

The Draconid meteor shower peaks tonight as the Earth sweeps through primordial dust spewed from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. Ernst Zinner was a pioneering researcher in the study of presolar grains, a brilliant scientist and wonderful man who spent most of his career in our lab here at Wash U. Comet 21P is named for Ernst Zinner, but a different Ernst Zinner, a German astronomer, who made the second observation of 21P in 1913. Clearly this is a charmed name for space science!

Hayabusa2 continues to impress — check out these amazing images!

I posted some new software on github here.

The field-emission scanning electron microscope we use in our lab is a commercial instrument, primarily made for industry to do things like failure analysis of mechanical parts. It is not designed for cosmochemistry, but the best instruments are flexible enough to allow us to do what we need to do efficiently. Our microscope allows for this through a Python-powered scripting interface and easy-to-automate XML files.

In our research we’re frequently looking for rare objects in a relatively large sample — such as hypervelocity impact craters on a metallic surface. So we have a need to acquire electron images over a large surface area that is tilted (or otherwise non-flat) on scales much larger than the depth-of-field of the electron image (typically ten micrometers). Our electron microscope can do autofocus, but this is slow and unreliable. The above code acquires a coarse topographic map and then fits a surface to this map from which it acquires high resolution images. Now we are able to scan centimeter-sized samples to look for micrometer-size features in a reasonable time! The company that makes the microscope certainly can’t foresee all of the uses we have for it, but we have the ability to control the microscope at a very basic level. And since we know how to do math and write code, anything is possible!

Exciting new paper from professors Meshik and Pravdivtseva as well as alumnus Evan Groopman!

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.