(rhythmic music)
- Wow!
(spraying)
Oo-oo! (laughs)
Hi everyone.
Thanks for joining us here
on Smithsonian Science How.
We've a really great show
today about meteorites.
And to talk about them
with us is Geologist
from the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History,
Doctor Cari Corrigan.
Cari, thank you so much for being here.
- Thanks, yeah, thank you for having me.
- So Cari you're a Geologist
here who studies meteorites.
- Yep.
- Can you tell us what that means?
- Yeah, so Geologists are
people who study rocks, right?
And meteorites are rocks,
but more specifically
they're rocks that come from outer space
and they've passed through
the Earth's atmosphere
and landed on the Earth.
- [Maggy] And where from outer space
are these meteorites coming from?
- So more than 95% of them
come from the Asteroid Belt,
but we actually do have a few
that also come from Mars and the Moon.
- So you brought a collection here
for us to take a look at today.
Can you tell us a little
bit about what we're seeing?
- Yep, you can see I brought
a number of different things,
and they all look a little bit different,
and it's because they're
all different types.
But here is some examples
of the kind that we have,
that we have the most of.
95% to the meteorites
that we have are these.
And you can see
they look a little bit
different from each other,
but they also look different on the inside
than they do on the outside.
- Yeah, it's pretty dark,
and actually looking at all
of the different examples
that you brought, they all
have this dark surface on them.
- Yep.
- Now before you tell us
what that dark surface is,
(Cari laughs)
I think we should ask our viewers.
What do you say?
- [Cari] Yeah, that sounds great.
- Viewers here's an opportunity
to participate in a live poll with us.
Tell us what you think
(soft, playful music)
by responding in the window that appears
to the right of your video screen.
The surface of the
meteorite is dark because:
Our collections mangers polished it;
Earth's atmosphere polished it;
It was cut with a sharp tool;
Or it is coated with
a different rock type.
Remember that this is the same place
that you can post questions
for Doctor Cari Corrigan
to answer during our live show.
And we have a special guest,
fellow Meteoriticist from
the Natural History Museum,
Doctor Tim McCoy, also
answering your questions
in the chat today.
Cari, we can see the results
coming in in real time
and 82% of our viewers think
that the Earth's atmosphere
polished these meteorites.
What do you say?
- I'd say that they're pretty much right.
So most of the people
guessed the right answer.
So actually the fusion
crust is what this is called
on the outside of these meteorites.
And it actually forms as the
meteorite's coming from space
and it's traveling really, really quickly
and it passes through
the Earth's atmosphere
and is going so hot
and rubbing up against the
atmosphere so fast and so hard
that is actually melts the outside,
and then it hits the ground and cools off.
- Very cool.
So what's causing these meteorites
to actually enter into Earth's atmosphere
in the first place, with that much speed?
- So out in the Asteroid Belt
where most of these are from,
they're actually meteor,
the asteroids are crashing into each other
and some of these get
launched off as meteorites
and they're traveling,
you know they have to hit
each other pretty hard
and as they're traveling through space
they're actually, there's
no, space is a vacuum,
there's nothing for them to
rub up against to slow down,
so they basically hit
the Earth's atmosphere
and that's the first
thing they've encountered
to slow them down.
So they're traveling really
quickly on their way in.
- So once they land on
Earth and you find them,
as a scientist, can you
look inside these meteorites
to find clues about that
impact that they had
out in outer space?
- Yeah, there are a
number of different ways
we can tell about the impacts,
and that's actually
what we're trying to do.
Some of my research revolves around
actually trying to understand
the collisional history
of the whole Solar System.
And some of these actually
have been hitting each other so hard
that tiny little diamonds,
which take a lot of pressure to form,
have actually formed.
So this is a Ureilite, and
it's one of a number of
couple of different meteorite
types that have diamonds.
And this is the picture
of it under a microscope.
- [Maggy] It's beautiful!
- Yeah, they're beautiful.
- So do all meteorites have diamonds?
- No, a few types do, but mostly
the really primitive ones,
but not all of them do, no.
- And so what,
do you have an example here
of a different meteorite
that has some kind of
evidence of a collision
that isn't a diamond?
- I do.
I brought a great example
of another type of clue that we use
to understand how rocks
have collided together.
And this one here has a melt clast,
this white clast in the rock
is actually a piece of an asteroid
that has been hit so hard
that it melted all the way.
And it may be a part
of the same asteroid that this came from
or it may have been one that
came in from somewhere else.
So these are--
- [Maggy] Is that what we're seeing now?
- Yep, these are them
underneath a Scanning Electron Microscope,
so you're actually looking
really, really closely
at those melted grains.
- So are you studying this
area of melted meteorite
to be able to understand
these bigger questions
about the Solar System
that you just mentioned?
- We are.
So these are, these are from the asteroids
that I've looked at.
This is part of the Asteroid Belt.
But you can actually look at
pieces of the Moon for example
and the Moon has a record of
impact that's really, really,
you know it's been happening forever.
There's a picture of an impact here
and you can see as the
impact crater is forming
the red melted part, it
actually splashes out,
and you end up with these Melt
Clasts all over the surface
of either the Moon
or the asteroid that you're looking at.
So the Earth we know
and if you're looking at this through time
we know the Solar System formed
about four and a half billion years ago,
and the Moon actually formed
from a really large impact
into Earth just after that,
actually not too long after.
So we wanna know what
happened after that even.
From then until now.
- So is there any way to tell
actually how old that impact,
the one that you were showing us, is?
- There is.
We can actually use isotopes
to try and date that.
And we do that with the Moon rocks too.
And we think,
on the Moon there is a big
cluster of melted material
that is 3.9 billion years old,
but not really very much
material older than that.
So we know there must have
been some really big event.
We think it's called, that
happened at 3.9 billion years
and it was either,
people call it either the
Late Heavy Bombardment
(pounding)
or the Lunar Cataclysm.
But you can see
lots of things impacted
the Moon at that time.
And we're also trying to understand
if that happened in the Asteroid Belt.
- So you said that that's
evident in the Moon.
- Yeah.
- Why wouldn't it be evident on Earth?
Because if there was a big event
would Earth be getting
bombarded at the same time?
- It would actually.
It should be all, you know the same,
the material that's coming
in should be hitting both,
and we have, on Earth
however, we have water,
we have volcanoes, we have plate
tectonics, all these things
that are actually erasing
the clues to the Earth's past
that are on the surface.
- So what kinda clues
do you have on the Moon?
- Well you can look at the
Moon and look at the surface
and see those really big,
you know, craters, the big,
if you look at the Moon,
yep you can see it's got
those big dark basins.
And each one if those is
actually an impact basin
from when something hit
the surface of the Moon.
And then we can look at the rocks at the,
for example the lunar
meteorites that come back
or the rocks that the Apollo
Astronauts brought back,
and understand and try to study
the melted pieces in
there to try understand
how they formed and when they formed.
- This is all very cool.
And I mean for, to do
all this kind of work
you have to identify where
these meteorites are coming from
in the first place.
- Right.
- And you showed me a little bit
about how you do that in your
lab here at the Smithsonian.
- Yep.
- It was very fascinating.
Let's show our viewers.
- Okay.
- Cari we're somewhere very special
and it happens to be the
place where you work.
Where are we at?
- Yep, we're in the Meteorite Vault
in the Department of Mineral Sciences
at the Natural History Museum.
And you can see behind us,
this is where we store out meteorites.
These are special cabinets
that actually keep the humidity level,
or the water level low, and
the air that they're in.
To keep those meteorites from rusting.
- So how many meteorites are
here in the Meteorite Vault?
- We have about 5000 in this room.
- [Maggy] Wow, that's amazing.
- Yeah.
- [Maggy] Do you know where all
of the meteorites come from?
- Yep, so that's one of
our jobs is to figure out
where these meteorites came
from, out in outer space.
We can look at this one for example,
and you can see it's got
Fusion Crust on the outside
and that what forms
when it comes through
the Earth's atmosphere.
- [Maggy] It's really heavy.
- That's a clue as to how we
know where this came from.
It's full of all that
shiny iron-nickel metal,
which is really heavy.
And so we know that this
came from an asteroid.
And this one we've sliced open.
You can see that we just
took one of our cutting saws
and sliced it right open
like a loaf of bread.
And just look at the inside.
And that inside
is where we can see in
most of our information.
We have another one over here.
So this looks very different,
if you have a look at the,
this has been sliced open also.
The Fusion Crust on this one
is a completely different color.
You wanna hold that one?
- [Maggy] And it's pretty bumpy and it
- [Cari] Yep.
- [Maggy] Looks like
there's a lotta different
rocks or something inside of it.
- [Cari] Yep.
So that one is actually from the Moon.
- [Maggy] Wow, really?
- Yep, and you can see right away
that the two of these are very
different, looking at them.
And that's because the
Moon's surface has been hit
by so many asteroids and
meteorites through time
that it's just been getting
churned up and churned up,
so each rock, you know the
new rocks that they make
are made up of lots of
little pieces of other rocks.
- So how can you tell for
sure that this is a Moon rock?
- We would make another slice of it.
This time a much thinner slice,
and we would glue that
down to a glass slide,
and then we will polish that
to the width of a human hair,
and then we can look
at it in the microscope
so we can pass enough light through it
to be able to identify what
the minerals are inside.
Different types have
different minerals in them.
- Can we look at that now?
- Yeah, let's do it.
- Awesome.
(soft, melodic music)
Okay, so I've put the
thin slice of the rock
here on the stage of this
Petrographic Microscope,
which is a kind of
microscope we use actually
to look at rocks
and try and understand
the minerals in them.
Have a look.
- [Maggy] Oh!
Wow, I didn't think it
would be that colorful!
- Yeah, it's beautiful.
So we're used a special kind of light
called Polarized Light,
and that actually brings out
the colors in the minerals.
And that can teach us
about their composition,
and what minerals they are,
and that actually helps us figure out
what kind of rock it is.
So if you have a look again,
we can actually learn even
more when we turn the stage.
- [Maggy] Oh, wow!
It's like the colors are
changing, or flashing.
- Yeah, it's like a kaleidoscope almost.
So we can actually learn
more about the minerals
when we do that, than just
when we hold it still.
- So it's really not
just a pretty picture.
You're getting important information
on this.
- Yeah, exactly!
- [Maggy] 'Kay, that was super cool.
I actually got to hold
a piece of the Moon.
- [Cari] Yeah.
- [Maggy] It was amazing.
And then I got to see how colorful it was
underneath that microscope.
So do all meteorites look like
that underneath the scope?
- [Cari] Yeah, and you can actually
see it on the screen here.
So this is piece of the Moon,
the lunar meteorite that Maggy held,
and you can see it up close,
that it's actually made up
of lots of different pieces
of other types of rocks.
- [Maggy] Very cool!
- Yeah.
- [Maggy] And it was surprising
to see all those colors
underneath that microscope.
- Right.
- So that is how you actually identify
a lot of these different
minerals and meteorites
and their origins.
- [Cari] Right, yep!
- Do you have any other
examples to share with us today?
- Of things underneath a microscope?
Yep, we do.
So we have a picture of a Chondrite.
So the meteorites I showed you first,
those are ordinary chondrites,
and if you look, this is one
underneath the microscope.
And you can see all those
round, circular things in there
are the chondrules that
make up a chondrite.
And those are basically in
the same way that they were
four and a half billion
years ago when they formed.
- [Maggy] Wow!
- [Cari] But then we have another one
where this meteorite
has probably been melted
so you can see that instead of having
all those individual little minerals,
these minerals have all kind of,
are all kind of smashed together
and they've regrown in that space.
- I wouldn't mind looking at
meteorites under a microscope
and identifying them as a job.
- Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
(Maggy laughs)
You can tell them apart pretty quickly.
- It's really beautiful.
'Kay let's learn a little
bit more about your work.
- [Cari] Okay.
- You worked specifically
on the Antarctic Meteorite Collection.
- Right.
- And you have actually
been to Antarctica.
to collect meteorites.
- Mm-hmm, I have.
- Now I was wondering before I talk to you
why you would ever go to Antarctica,
and some of our viewers might
be wondering the same thing.
- Yep!
- So let's ask them what they might think,
why you would go there in the first place?
- Sure.
- Viewers here's an
opportunity to participate
in another live poll.
Tell us, Antarctica is a good
place to search for meteorites
because it's:
Cold;
Mountainous;
Windy;
Or close to outer space.
Take a moment to think about
and put in your answer in
the window that appears
to the right of the video.
(lively, playful music)
The results are still coming in,
and there's kind of a
smattering across all responses,
but most people think that
it's because it's cold.
- And they would be right.
But actually it turns out
that it's because it's cold
and because it's mountainous,
and because it's windy.
And while it has the highest elevation
of any of the continents
overall, that's probably,
doesn't help because
meteorites actually fall
all over the Earth equally.
But the cold is what has,
the really the main reason.
So if you can see on the
graphic on the screen,
the meteorites fall onto the
ice and then they get buried,
and then they travel with the ice.
And they get stuck up
against the mountain range
called the Transantarctic Mountains
that run the whole length of Antarctica.
And then there's such a dry, strong wind
that actually bringing,
sort of degrading the ice on the surface,
and the meteorites get left
just sitting there on the surface,
waiting for us to come pick them up.
In just like this.
- [Maggy] Is that you with a meteorites?
- [Cari] It is me with a meteorite.
And that was probably
the biggest meteorite we found the season,
that season that I went.
- [Maggy] So do you pick your field sites
based on where those mountain ranges are?
- Yes, we do.
So if we, we know that
Antarctica's basically a dome shape
and the ice flows downhill,
so we know where it's going to get stuck
when it hits up against those mountains.
And we can go look for places
that are called Blue Ice Regions
and those are where the ice
tends to be really stuck.
So you can see on this
map the place, the Lo Paz,
and the MacAlpine Hills,
those are two of the places
that I visited,
and those are right along
that mountain range.
And this is another place I
visited, called Meteorite Hills.
And actually each of
these red and blue dots
is a meteorite that was
found in one of two seasons
of people that went to
search for meteorites there.
So that's well over a thousand meteorites.
- Over a thousand meteorites?
- Yeah.
- So you--
- Just in that one place.
- And you can visit this
same location year after year
and continually find new specimens?
- Right.
Yeah usually we'll go back,
maybe a few years in between,
because the snow blows around
and things get uncovered that
we may have missed before.
- That's very interesting.
- Yeah.
- So what is it like to
actually go to Antarctica
to look for meteorites?
I know that you sleep in tents
in sleeping bags on the ice.
- Yeah we do.
And it's, it's a really long trip,
and it is cold just like
everybody would suspect.
But it's really exciting
because some places you go,
you're the first person
to have ever been there,
and you're the first person to find,
maybe the first person
to see a piece of space.
- [Maggy] And it's beautiful.
- And it's beautiful.
So this is a place that we camped.
You can see the image there,
that's our practice tent camping,
and we practiced learning how
to use all that equipment.
And it's right next
to the southernmost
active volcano on Earth,
called Mount Erebus, which is cool.
And then they take you out into the field
and you use the snowmobiles
to search on just this
bare ice, like this,
or you may walk around in glacial moraines
where there a lot of terrestrial rocks
that you're actually trying
to find the meteorites
that are sitting in
between all of those rocks.
- What a fascinating trip that must be.
- Yeah!
It is, yeah.
And it's a little bit lonely but it's,
it's an amazing experience.
- Amara has a really great
question that comes in by video.
- Okay.
- About, that's really,
plays well to this
conversation about Antarctica.
- Okay, perfect.
- Let's have a look.
- Yeah.
- Hi, I'm Amara and I was wondering
if keeping a meteorite in
the cold helps preserve it.
- It absolutely does.
So if you, if you think
about exposing a rock,
any old rock, to water,
or if you put your bike outside, right.
What happens to you bike if you put it out
and leave it out there in the rain?
It rusts.
And so keeping Antarctic, and
keeping rocks in Antarctica,
so basically where that water is frozen,
it can't interact with the rocks there,
where it could here for example.
So keeping them cold and
keeping them from rusting
is one of the great
reasons to keep 'em there.
- So meteorites can get rusty?
- They can, actually they're made out of,
out of iron.
They have a lot of iron metal in there.
And if you look at the one
that's showing on the screen right now
you can see there's
some rusty places here,
and this one has a lot of rust in it.
Just in these little pockets
where it's starting to form.
But this one that just came
back, the larger one behind
just came back from Antarctica
maybe two years ago,
and it's got a nice clean surface,
without much rust on it at all.
- Cari, there's a video segment
that shows how you keep these
meteorites safe from rusting,
- Yeah.
- here at the Smithsonian.
Let's show our viewers.
- Okay.
(door opening)
(dramatic, rhythmic music)
I'm Cari Corrigan.
- And I'm Linda Welzenbach,
and we are in the Gowning Area
that precedes the Clean Room.
Cari and I are sitting
in the Antarctica
Meteorite Storage Facility
in Suitland, Maryland.
This facility houses all
the Antarctica meteorites
that are collected in the US
Antarctica Meteorite Program.
- We have about 15 thousand
Antarctica meteorites.
- This facility is a Clean Room,
which is why we're dressed so strangely.
And it is meant to essentially
eliminate contaminants
that may interact with the meteorite.
- This is one of our dry
nitrogen storage cabinets
and you could see they
have these funny gloves
that stick out,
and they stick out because
there is pressured nitrogen gas
inside of here.
And this is what we use
to store our meteorites.
And the reason that
they're in dry nitrogen
is so that they don't
get exposed to moisture,
and also there in these cabinets
so they aren't contaminated by anything.
Keeping things like this and
the meteorites that we have
in this kind of storage,
actually preserves them
for when the instrumentation
gets better and better,
30, 40, 50, a hundred years from now,
we can make even more detailed
measurements than we can now.
But that the meteorites will
still be fresh as they were
when they came off the ice.
- When the last 30 years
we've collected more
new types of meteorites
including finding meteorites
from the Moon and Mars,
than we have in the last 500 years.
- 'Kay it's really interesting
that you keep those meteorites fresh!
And I understand that you keep them fresh
all the way from their trip to Antarctica
all the way here to the Smithsonian.
How do you do that?
- We keep them, so we basically,
once we pick up a meteorite,
we never touch it with our
hands if we can help it,
we put it in a bag and
we wrap it in the bag
and then we put it into cold storage
so it stays frozen,
basically just stays outside
in a box in Antarctica
'cause it's not gonna melt.
And then it goes on a freezer
ship and a freezer truck
until it gets to the lab,
where it's then thawed out.
But we're doing that to keep
the different organic materials
and keep it from rusting.
So keep all of that stuff
from getting exposed to the
atmosphere, and warming up.
- What kind of things in the meteorites
are you actually trying to
preserve for future study?
- So that's a really good question, so.
And some of the stuff we
may not even know yet,
but a lot of it, like
recently people have,
they've found amino acids in meteorites
and so we're keeping our organics off,
our organics off of the
rocks for one thing.
But we're also looking
at, for example we have,
I brought a rock here from Mars.
This is a Martian meteorite
called Allan Hills 84001.
And it's a four billion year
old piece of igneous rock.
- [Maggy] Four Billion?
- [Cari] Yep, four billion,
(Maggy laughs)
only four.
(Cari laughs)
- [Maggy] Wow, it's really old.
- [Cari] Yeah, it's a
really old rock from Mars,
but it contains in it, carbonate minerals,
and carbonate minerals
require water to form.
So this is our hand sample evidence
that there is actually has
been liquid water on Mars.
So, older, so this
would have formed before
all of the collision history
on the Moon, for example.
And that could, it would,
the carbonates we think are
actually younger than that,
but the rock itself is
four billion years old.
- So you know this rock is special
because it comes in it's very own case.
- Yes,
- But you that it's igneous.
- [Cari] Yep.
- [Maggy] And that it contains
evidence of liquid water.
- [Cari] Right.
- [Maggy] And sitting here on
Earth we have igneous rocks,
we have liquid water.
- Right.
- I mean does that mean that early Mars
could have been a lot like Earth?
- Yeah, so these are some of the clues,
so this is our rock clue, right?
The one that we can
actually hold in our hand.
But we also have space craft
that are up there taking
pictures of the surface of Mars,
and we're using clues like
the gullies you can see here,
and other layering in places
that look like water
created those features.
So we can use all that evidence together,
and looking just at the surface of Mars
you can see the lowlands.
There may have been areas
that were filled with water.
It was probably a much warmer,
much wetter place in the past.
- So how do you know
definitively, for sure,
that this rock came from
Mars in the first place?
- Right, so that's another
really good question.
So we've, for a long
time we had these rocks,
and until we actually sent
space craft to these plan,
to Mars, to other planets,
we didn't know that any of
the meteorites that we had
came from anywhere else for sure.
So the Viking Landers
went to Mars in the 1970s
and they measured the
composition of the atmosphere,
and then later in the '80s,
we found we have another type
of ingenious rock from Mars
but this one is only about maybe
a half a billion years old,
so a hundred and 50 million
to 500 million years old.
But there are Melt Pockets
so we're talking about melted rocks again,
and there are pockets in
there that are melted,
that actually trap,
when they melt and then
cool really quickly,
they trap the atmosphere
that is around them.
So some scientists were able to measure
the composition of that trapped atmosphere
and compare it to the measurements
that the Viking Landers
made of the atmosphere
and it's a one-to-one match.
And you could see the melt rock,
the Melt Pockets in this rock
from the picture that's showing.
- [Maggy] That's really
fascinating, and I mean
this rock is relatively
young in comparison
to that other one that you
showed us, Allan Hills.
- [Cari] Yep it's, yeah, much younger.
So that tells us there
were actually volcanoes
that were active on Mars that recently.
- That's pretty interesting.
- Yeah.
- So do you have any
other meteorites from Mars
to be able to help you kind
of piece together the story?
- We do.
I brought one more.
So this one actually fits sort
of in the history in between.
This is called Nakhla,
and it's one of a group of
meteorites called Nakhlites
'cause this was the
first one of it's type.
And these are only a billion years old.
So older than the Shergottites,
this other one that we use
to figure out that they were from Mars,
but much, much younger
than Allan Hills 84001
at four billion years.
And you can see the
Nakhlites are beautiful
underneath the microscope,
which is part of the reason
I like to study them.
- [Maggy] They really are!
- [Cari] Yeah.
This is an even more thin
sectioned microscope images
that are showing.
So this one is a billion years old,
but we know it's igneous also,
except that instead of being a lava flow
it would have formed from
probably deeper below the surface.
Which is another, so we,
we can look at other
types of igneous rocks
on the surface of Mars.
- So all these different meteorites,
especially the Mars ones,
are helping you
- Yep.
- really piece together
the history of Mars.
But even the Solar System origins.
- Right, because every one of these
had to have come off of Mars
during an impact, right?
So this, we know this formed deep,
but it had to have somehow
gotten off of Mars.
So either that was a really
big impact that knocked it,
or it was exposed to lots
of different impacts.
Yeah, as you can see in this picture,
there's a picture of
this deeper rock, maybe.
It could have been at the
bottom of that packet of rocks.
- Very cool.
- Yeah.
- 'Kay.
Thank you so much for sharing
a little bit about your work on meteorites
here at the Smithsonian.
- Yeah, you're very welcome.
- We have a lot of student questions.
Let's try
- Great!
- to get to as many as we can.
- Okay, sure.
- Right, the first one comes from Draco.
"What do the mineral tell
us about the meteorites?"
- So the minerals within the meteorites,
a lot of times we can, we can
look at individual minerals
and figure out the
temperatures for example.
Or the pressures that
these were formed at.
We can know,
individual minerals form
at specific temperatures,
so it can tell us some of the
conditions that they formed,
plus it can tell us the
composition of what was around.
So we can
today these are made up of
iron, magnesium, and silicon,
or these are made up of
calcium and aluminum,
sodium, and silicon, for example.
- This one is from Mrs West's class.
"What is the biggest meteorite on file?"
- So that a very good question.
So the largest meteorite in,
that we have on Earth is called Hoba,
and it's so big that it's still
sitting in the hole it made
when it was form, when it fell,
(Maggy giggles)
in Namibia,
which is in Southern Africa.
- We have an audio question this time,
- Okay.
- coming in by video,
so let's have a look.
- Sure, okay.
- Hi, my name is Crystal
and I just wanted to know if
you found anything recently
in the slices of the meteorite
that you were studying?
- That's a great question, Crystal,
and since most of my research
talks of, is about impact,
then the answer is yes, we have.
So we have been slicing meteorites open,
and you can see here's one of them.
That's just slicing it up like
a loaf of bread with a saw.
And there actually, if you
look at the next image,
we have circled some of the things
that we thing might be Impact Melts
that we're looking for
in one of these slabs.
And then we would take those
and make the microscope sections of them.
So this is sort of the
next place we would start.
- So you make new
discoveries all the time.
- We do.
Yeah, it's fun.
- This one comes from Agnes.
- Okay.
- "Did all the meteorites
form within the Solar System?"
- As far as we know, all of
the meteorites that we have,
formed in our Solar System.
There may be pieces, like I was sayin'
we have some pre-solar grains
in some of the meteorites,
that may have formed
outside of our Solar System,
but for the most part we think
that they have all come from
inside our Solar System.
- [Maggy] KLO Middle School asks
"What is the biggest diamond
found in a meteorite?"
- Alright, okay, well that's
a really good question.
(Maggy laughs)
They're not very big.
So it's not something
that you would break open
the meteorite and say
"Let's make a ring out
of this," for example.
They're tiny, tiny little
things like microns
or maybe, maybe up to a millimeter across.
Not, not big!
- Alexandra asks, "Are
there minerals in meteorites
"that are not found on Earth?"
- There,
so that's, there are a few, yes.
So we've found, and not that many.
Not as many as you'd expect,
because all the elements are the same
and the condition, but the
conditions are different.
So the conditions in space are
a little bit different enough
that there are some el, some minerals
that do form on the
asteroids that we don't have.
And a lot of times
once you bring those minerals
onto the Earth's surface
and expose them to Earth-like conditions,
the minerals will actually transform
into a different mineral that's
stable on our conditions.
- KLO Middle wants to know
"How long you've been
doing this type of work?"
- That's another really good question.
So, I worked here at the
museum for about eight years.
Before that I was
actually a Post-Doc here.
So total of about 10 years,
but I started studying meteorites
when I was an undergraduate,
purely by accident actually.
- [Maggy] Did you ever think
that you were going to be a Geologist,
let alone studying meteorites?
- [Cari] Probably not when I was
in Middle School, for example.
I barely even knew what a meteorite was
(Maggy laughs)
at that point.
And I certainly didn't
know you could have a job
where you studied them,
or worked in a museum taking care of them.
- [Maggy] So went to
Antarctica to collect them.
- [Cari] Or, never, no!
And to be fair that's
part of what drew me in
to studying meteorites is actually
(Maggy chuckles)
wanting to.
And then I had,
ended up with an internship
at Johnson Space Center
where I was an intern, and I studied,
I studied the meteorites and
met a lot of people
including my PhD advisor
and my boss at that time.
- [Maggy] So now do you take interns?
- I do.
I've had probably eight or nine interns
since I started working here.
And it's a really fun way
that I learn new things
while also teaching other people things.
- Very cool.
- Yeah.
- Cari, thank you so much
for helping us understand
a little bit more about meteorites
and your work here at the Smithsonian.
- Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
It's been so fun.
- Can you tell our viewers
where they can learn
a little bit more
- Sure.
- if they're involved,
if they're interested in getting involved
in this kinda thing?
- Yep, so you can start by,
we have the Division of Meteorites
in the Mineral Sciences
Department here at the museum.
We have a website.
NASA Has some fantastic information
about meteorites on their website.
And you can get involved
by just going to your local Geology Club,
many of those have Kids Clubs
and you can get involved in that way.
- Thank you so much.
- Yes, thank you.
- And thank you viewers
for tuning in today
and asking such great questions.
This is it for our show today,
but if you wanna see this program again,
you can check it out at
Q?rius at qrius.si.edu
where there are also some cool
links and teaching resources.
That's it for this season of Science How,
but we'll be back next school year.
Have a great summer.
(lively, rhythmic music)
