News

We have been watching with the rest of the world the unfolding of recent events in the United States and the resulting turmoil. This brings home to us yet again that we have a ways to go before we achieve the just and equitable world that we all aspire to. If unacknowledged and unchecked, discrimination and injustice can enter any organization or community – and can destroy the very foundations upon which we are building our future. More…

William A. (Bill) Cassidy, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geology and Planetary Science of the University of Pittsburgh, passed away quietly in his home in Monroeville, PA on March 25, 2020, at the age of 92. Bill leaves behind a deep legacy of contributions to the fields of impact crater studies and meteoritics. More…

Sabina D. Raducan, currently a PhD student in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College, London, is awarded the 2020 Pellas-Ryder Award for her paper titled “The role of asteroid strength, porosity and internal friction in impact momentum transfer” published in Icarus in 2019. More…

Bruce Forbes Bohor, the 2011 Barringer Medalist of the Meteoritical Society (Glass, 2011), passed away at his home in Green Valley, Arizona, on November 17, 2019. Bruce is best known in our community for his discovery of shocked quartz in layers marking the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T, now called the Cretaceous-Paleogene, K-Pg) boundary in the central United States in the early 1980s, following the famous paper by Alvarez and co-authors in Science in 1980, in which they report geochemical evidence for an asteroid impact from K-Pg layers in Italy. More…

The meteoritical community lost a remarkable scientist, mentor, colleague and friend with the passing of Edward J. Olsen on January 30, 2020 at his home in Madison, Wisconsin. Ed is survived by his wife of 38 years, Lorain Olsen, his daughters Andrea Southwood and Ericka Olsen and his grandson Jacob Taggart. More…

Ahmed El Goresy died at his home in Heidelberg on October 3, 2019, at the age of 85. Ahmed El Goresy was a highly regarded mineralogist with a worldwide reputation. His research focused on minerals and mineral assemblages of extraterrestrial samples. With his major tool, reflected light microscopy, he studied meteorite samples from asteroids, Moon, and Mars, and lunar rocks and terrestrial impactites. More…

Prof. Laurel Wilkening, a meteoriticist, university administrator, and advocate for planetary science and for women’s issues, passed away on June 4, 2019, in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 74. Born in Richland, Washington, on Nov. 23, 1944, she grew up in Socorro, New Mexico, and got her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Reed College. More…

Prof. Keizo Yanai, a founder of Antarctic meteorite research, passed away on December 17, 2018, at the age of 77, in Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, after several years of declining health. Keizo served many years as a curator at the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) of Japan where he collected and allocated thousands of Antarctic meteorites for our community. He was born on July 25, 1941, in Furudono, Fukushima, Japan. He received his B.S. from Akita University and his Ph.D. degree in petrology (Mesozoic igneous rocks) from Tohoku University. More…

Simon J. Lock, currently a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology, is awarded the 2019 Pellas-Ryder Award for his paper titled “The Origin of the Moon within a Terrestrial Synestia” published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets in 2018. Simon Lock was a Ph.D student at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, working with Sarah T. Stewart (now at UC Davis), when the paper was submitted. More…

The McKay Award for the 81st Annual Meeting in Moscow is given to Timothy Gregory (University of Bristol) for the presentation " Using refractory forsterite grains to test models of 26Al/27Al heterogeniety". More…