Associate Professor Brian Hynek will spend the holidays working with a small NASA team to collect meteorites in Antarctica. This is professor Hynek’s second deployment to the ice to work with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET). The team is working in at a remote camp near Mount Davis and the Ward nunataks, which has been visited by only a couple dozen people in the history of human civilization. This area has yielded many hundreds of meteorites and the team hopes to find many hundreds more.
Meteorites are invaluable samples that allow us to decipher the early history of the solar system, such as the building of planets including our own Earth. ANSMET has recovered about 30,000 meteorites in 41 seasons of searching. The samples are all curated at NASA and the Smithsonian and available for research by any scientists in the world. You can follow the team’s blog to see what discoveries await and learn what it’s like to conduct geological fieldwork in one of the most remote parts of our planet: http://caslabs.case.edu/ansmet/