by Playfuls Staff |
29th March 2007
A U.S. researcher says meteorites provide an amazing wealth of information and otherwise unobtainable clues into the [more] evolution of the solar system.
Michael Lipschutz, a professor of inorganic chemistry and cosmochemistry at Purdue University, says more than 31,000 meteorites have been found on Earth, with weights ranging from less than one gram to 60 metric tons.
"Meteorites are the poor man's space probe," he said in a presentation to the American Chemical Society national meeting in Chicago. "Some contain materials created before the solar system was formed and illustrate processes that occurred 4.56 billion years ago. No other accessible material provides such information, and they are delivered right to us."
Lipschutz says meteorites are critical to supplementing and interpreting data gathered from remote sensing technology.
"Meteorites are pristine samples of solar system matter, and their chemical and physical properties give us 'ground truths' about their planet of origin as if we had taken measurements on the planet's surface," he said.
© 2007 UPI
