ANSMET 2015-2016 North to South in the Miller Range, Antarctica
2015-2016 ANSMET Team Members |
John Schutt*, head mountaineer and field safety officer since 1980, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio |
Jim Karner*, science lead, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio |
Brian Rougeux*, second mountaineer |
Constantine (Con) Tsang, Southwest Research Institute |
Morgan Martinez*, University of California San Diego |
Cindy Evans, NASA Johnson Space Center |
Ellen Crapster-Pregont, Columbia University and the American Museum of natural History |
Nina Lanza, Los Alamos National Laboratory |
Veterans of previous seasons are marked with an asterisk (*).
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The Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program returned to the Miller Range for the ninth time. Three big icefields and a dozen or so smaller icefields throughout the Miller Range have yielded such a bonanza of recovered meteorites (~2400 leading up to this season) that an ANSMET team has worked here every other year since 2003. The diverse meteorites recovered so far in the Miller Range (designated with the MIL prefix) belong to 65 different classes, including rare types such as
nakhlites, lunar meteorites, unclassified
achondrites, and olivine
diogenites. This season's team recovered 569 meteorite specimens that are now enroute to the Antarctic Meteorite laboratory at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas.
The 2015-2016 team conducted snowmobile-aided and boots-on-the-ice traverses across previously unsearched ice in their systematic search for meteorites at the margins of the northern Miller Range icefields. A planned mid-season move in late December brought the team to the southern end of the range, where they reported their coldest temperatures of -7 degrees Fahrenheit. Winds whipped up to 60 mph.
ANSMET is a NASA-funded program meeting the strong scientific demand for new extraterrestrial specimens. As described at the
ANSMET website by Principal Investigator Ralph Harvey (Case Western Researve University), "These specimens are a reliable, continuous source of new, non-microscopic extraterrestrial material and support thousands of scientists from around the globe as they seek essential 'ground-truth' concerning the materials that make up the asteroids, planets and other bodies of our solar system." NASA and the Smithsonian Institution share the responsibilities of classifying, storing, and distributing Antarctic meteorites to researchers around the globe. Details of curation, characterization, and allocation of the ANSMET meteorites are available from the NASA Johnson Space Center:
curator.jsc.nasa.gov/antmet/index.cfm. Qualified scientists are directed to that site for more information about procedures and deadlines for sample requests.
(pdf version)
For more information see: the ANSMET website,
the February 2016 Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, and from
PSRD:
ANSMET 2011-2012 Field Season in the Miller Range,
ANSMET 2013-2014 Field Season in the Miller Range,
Meteorites on Ice, and
Searching Antarctic Ice for Meteorites.
See NASA Tumblr post with pictures from the 2015-2016 ANSMET expedition.
See also:
35 Seasons of U.S. Antarctic Meteorites (1976-2010): A Pictorial Guide to the Collection, edited by K. Righter, C. Corrigan, T. McCoy, and R. Harvey, American Geophysical Union and John Wiley & Sons, Inc., December 2014, 320 pages.
Written by Linda Martel, Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, for
PSRD.