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October 2024 Newsletter

October 1, 2024 Nancy Chabot

Dear Meteoritical Society Members,
We wanted to share some MetSoc business and community-provided announcements in this monthly email for October 2024:

  • Position Statement on the Collection, Trade, and Curation of Extraterrestrial Materials – We'd like to remind members of the position statement adopted a number of years ago by the Meteoritical Society: Members who recover, collect, trade, display or do research on meteorites should comply with all applicable national, state and local laws and regulations, international conventions and agreements, institutional and professional rules and codes, and rules of best scientific practice. The full position statement text is available on our website.

  • Nominations Are Open for 2025 Awards – It's not too early to nominate a deserving colleague for a MetSoc award! Nominations are due February 15, 2025, for the Leonard Medal, Barringer Award, Nier Prize, and Service Award. Pellas-Ryder Award nominations are due January 31, 2025. Visit the Awards page of the website for details.

  • Report from the Annual Meeting in Brussels – The annual meeting had 505 participants from 33 different countries, presenting 470 abstracts! Read the report from the 2024 annual meeting here, and thank you to the local organizing committee for hosting a fabulous meeting!

  • McKay and Wiley Awards Announced – We are delighted to announce the 2024 McKay and Wiley Award recipients for top student oral presentations at the annual meeting! Read this news story for more details.

    • The 2024 McKay Award is awarded to two students:

      • Daniel Sheikh (Portland State University, USA)

      • Leah Shteynman (Arizona State University, USA)

    • The 2024 Wiley Award is given to five students:

      • Sian Boultby (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

      • Shiori Inada (University of Tokyo, Japan)

      • Moshammat Mijjum (Purdue University, USA)

      • Anna Musolino (Aix Marseille University, France)

      • Anna Zappatini (University of Bern, Switzerland)

COMMUNITY SUBMITTED ANNOUNCEMENTS

South Africa Fall Event on 2024/08/25
A spectacular bolide was observed by hundreds of people along the southern coastline and hinterland of South Africa at 06:50:49 UTC on 2024/08/25 (https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/). Meteorite fragments were retrieved near the town of Nqweba by a 9-year-old girl after she heard an object falling through a nearby tree. According to the South African National Heritage Resources Act (No. 25 of 1999), meteorites that fall within the country are regarded as items of national heritage and cannot be collected, traded, or exported without a permit.

The Eastern Cape Provincial Heritage Authority has granted the collection permit to a joint team from Nelson Mandela University, Rhodes University, and the University of the Witwatersrand, comprising Drs Carla Dodd, Deon van Niekerk and Leonidas Vonopartis, and Profs Lew Ashwal and Roger Gibson. The team has presented preliminary findings on the bolide and the meteorite fragments, which have been referred to as Nqweba (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8oXegqvSg). The research team is conducting searches within the predicted strewn field and will provide regular updates on the project's progress following subsequent petrological and geochemical analysis.

Regards,
Roger Gibson

Job Announcement:
Postdoctoral Position at Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (Université Paris-Saclay) – Orsay, France : "3D X-ray Diffraction Analysis of primitive extra-terrestrial material from sample return missions"

We seek a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher with expertise in X-ray diffraction (XRD), particularly on extraterrestrial materials, to join our research team to study samples returned from carbonaceous asteroids by the Hayabusa2 (JAXA) and, possibly, OSIRIS-REX (NASA) space missions.

In 2024, XCT and XRD-CT data were measured for 6 different grains (5 grains from Ryugu and samples from Orgueil) using the PSICHE beamline at the SOLEIL synchrotron. The postdoctoral researcher will have to process the XRD-CT data to determine the mineralogy of the different clasts/fragments and to combine the XCT with XRD-CT data to correlate mineralogical differences with structural differences. A request for Bennu grains has been submitted by the host team at IAS for measurement combining XCT and XRD-CT. If successful, the candidate will be involved in these measurements and will be able to work on the structural and mineralogical differences between Ryugu and Bennu. In addition, beamtime proposal has been submitted to perform a new set of XCT / XRD-CT measurements in 2025 on PSICHE beamline.

More detailed description are found here: https://www.ias.universite-paris-saclay.fr/fr/le-laboratoire/travailler-a-l-ias

Session Proposals Solicited for Goldschmidt 2025

Dear Members of the Meteoritical Society,

We encourage you to submit a session proposal for Goldschmidt 2025, taking place from July 6-11 in Prague, Czech Republic.
Theme 1 "From Dust to Planets" encompasses all aspects of cosmochemistry. We look forward to your contributions that foster dialogue and advance our understanding of the Solar System and extrasolar planetary systems.

Theme 1 Description:
Chemical and isotopic variations among extra-terrestrial materials and Solar System bodies reflect diverse chemical and physical processes that occurred at different evolutional stages of the Solar System. The composition of the Earth, a rocky planet with oceans and life, was shaped through a series of processes, such as accretion of dust to its protoplanetary building blocks, the formation and differentiation of magma oceans, the final Moon-forming giant impact, and the delivery of volatiles.

The compositions of Solar System materials thus provide a window into the 4.57-billion-year history of the Solar System and even the evolution of the Galaxy. Understanding the compositional diversities of Solar System bodies also provides insights into the compositions of exoplanets, for which observational constraints are steadily increasing.

This theme focuses on the chemical and isotopic compositions of extra-terrestrial materials, planets, satellites, and small bodies of the Solar System, and aims to understand the evolutionary processes that shaped planet compositions over the history of the Galaxy. We welcome contributions from diverse fields – sample return missions, robotic explorations, astrophysical modeling, astronomical observations across various wavelengths of light, laboratory experiments and analyses, and sample curation. We anticipate new ‘chemistry’ between disciplines to propel the field forward!

On behalf of the Theme 1 Chairs,

Jessica Barnes (University of Arizona)
Audrey Bouvier (Universität Bayreuth)
Thorsten Kleine (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research)
Shogo Tachibana (University of Tokyo)

Share your announcements with MetSoc members – Submission guidelines and other details are given on the society's website.

Thank you for being a part of the Meteoritical Society, and please feel free to reach out to us at any time.
Nancy Chabot, Meteoritical Society President, metsocpres@gmail.com
Jutta Zipfel, Meteoritical Society Secretary, metsocsec@gmail.com
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