A gang of heavily insulated scientists has wrapped up its Antarctic expedition, with its members thawing out from the experience, but pleased to have bagged more than 300 space rocks.
They are participants in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, or ANSMET for short.
Since 1976, ANSMET researchers have been recovering thousands of meteorite specimens from the East Antarctic ice sheet.
ANSMET is funded by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.
According to the ANSMET website, the specimens are currently the only reliable, continuous source of new, nonmicroscopic extraterrestrial material.
Given that there are no active planetary sample-return missions coming or going at the moment, the retrieval of meteorites is the cheapest and only guaranteed way to recover new things from worlds beyond the Earth.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment