A few years ago I did a school science fair project with my daughter on micro-meteorites. We had read about collecting them from the gutter, but came up with a new idea. We went up the canyon and found an unspoiled patch of snow, hoping to minimize any terrestrial contamination. We loaded up a big tote with the stuff and brought it home to melt. After it melted, we used a magnet to pull any iron particles out of the water. When we placed the particles on a microscope slide, we found multiple micro-meteorites. We could distinguish them because they were perfect little spheres. Looked just like microscopic BBs. This method only picks up the iron ones, but was a lot of fun. This ended up being a fascinating project, and not too hard. Good enough for honorable mention at state. ________________________________ From: Utah-Astronomy <utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com> on behalf of Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2017 6:24 AM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Micro-meteorites in today's NYT I believe the same guy was recently featured in S&T. I have searched for micro-meteorites around my house in the past, sifting through rain-gutter debris, but like the aricle's author when he began his search, was always defeated by the staggering amount of "meteor-wrongs". Industruial particulates, common terrestrial dust, etc. I may take another stab at it one of these days. There's always been a lot of talk about a Salt Flats meteorite search, it should be easy to find a strewnfield if you can get out there quickly after a fall, but never heard of anyone doing anything more than a casual search, so I'm curious too! Bob, if you can make it to the next Liver & Onions luncheon, several of us will be bringing meteorite specimens for show & tell. I have a specimen of the Chelyabinsk bolide of 2013. On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 9:56 PM, BOB MARILYN <CINCOYMAYA@msn.com> wrote:
I’m intrigued by today’s article in the New York Times science section about amateur micro-meteorite collection. If they can find such beautiful objects in gutters and on roofs, I would imagine that the salt flats should have collected a lot of objects smaller than bowling balls. Has anyone of this list successfully searched and collected any there? Any tips to share?
Bob Grant
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