Cool rocks from a cool place

I have just been reading Katie Joy’s most recent blog from Antarctica. It’s all good news. The search team have now collected this season’s 82nd meteorite specimen. An awesome achievement considering that this is just the second field season for the UK’s Antarctic meteorite initiative. Last season was really just a reconnaissance trip and even…

Being curious

Let’s face it presolar grains are neat. Tiny particles from stars that lived and died before our Solar System was born. The story of how these mysterious microscopic minerals were first identified, isolated and extracted from meteorites must surely be one of the great scientific detective stories of the late twentieth century. And clearly it…

A Planetary Meeting in Oxford

For the last few days I have been hanging out at the British Planetary Science Conference (BPSC) being held in Oxford. BPSC takes place every two years and in fact this is just its second outing, the inaugural meeting was in Glasgow in December 2017. Sharing your work with colleagues and catching up with all…

A very nice start to 2020

On the evening of January 1st 2020 a bright fireball lit up the early evening sky over northern Italy. It was captured by the new Italian PRISMA video fireball-tracking network and a trajectory and drop zone for the meteoroid calculated. It was likely to have fallen close to the village of Disvetro in the Cavezzo…