Way back when I had a job at the Natural History Museum, London studying Calcium Aluminium-rich Inclusions (CAIs), in various types of meteorites. The oldest dated Solar System materials, CAIs are fascinating objects and it was exciting work. My boss back then was Robert Hutchison, an inspirational scientist, who is greatly missed by all who…
For a short time I had a job working for a geophysical exploration company based in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was a pretty dull occupation, running data crunching programs in a sort of air-conditioned Nissen hut. I was looking forward to leaving and taking up a place on a M.Sc. geology course in Canada, when news…
To the outside world science can seem to be full of unanswered questions. “More research needed” are the usual last words on a host of unsolved mysteries. So sometimes it’s great to have a few certainties, like for example, well, how the Moon was formed. Of course it was all down to a Mars-sized planet…
The chances of anything coming from Mars are… well quite low, as the song says. So Martian meteorites do tend to get a lot of attention, but none more so than NWA 7034. As discussed in a recent post on my research blog, this new meteorite has an oxygen isotope composition that is very…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 