Martian Meteorite NWA 4925

If you have been following my blog for any length of time you'll know I have purchased both Lunar and Martian property. Well now I have in my possession both Lunar and Martian actual property in the form of rocks!! That's right I have actual pieces of both celestial bodies that I can hold.


I know what you're saying, "Big Whoop", wow I can't believe you said that, ...well actually you didn't say that, I wrote it, but that's besides the point, just think about it, I am holding a piece of a celestial body other than Earth's.

It's journey probably started when a meteor pierced through the Martian atmosphere and collided with the planet, ejecting rock faster then the Martian escape velocity into space, it ventured forward into our Solar System to be captured by Earth's gravitational pull to become a falling star to land on our planet, then it was found by a lucky person. Some of the fallen meteorite will be used as research and some to be sold on eBay and in meteorite stores.... enter moi, I put it under a microscope to show you all what it looks like, what a fantastic journey.


How do we know it's from Mars? Well with all the information scientists have gather from spacecrafts such as the Voyagers, Rovers and Phoenix we know the mineralogy of the planet and Martian Meteorite NWA 4925 is a perfect fit. There are only around 50 Martian meteorites that we know of to date that have landed here on Earth, so they are fairly rare and expensive, but there are some Martian Meteorite owners that have cut up some of their meteorites into tiny little pieces so as to make it affordable for people like you and me to own.

As you can see from the above image the samples are very small so you have to be very careful with handling the sample, least you loose it. The very first thing I did when I got one of my samples was open the box to play with it.... not a good thing, dropped it on the carpet, down I go, the cat too, looking for my missing rock, the cat's all over it, I'm on my hands and knees , I'm pushing the cat away, the cats barking at me, I'm barking at the cat, not a pretty site. Finally found it before the cat, put it under the microscope and the images above are what the sample looks like at 40 and 100x magnification, geez what I do for science.





Between the mechanical breakdowns at CERN and their regular winter shutdown looks like the LHC will be down now till next spring. Cern has been plagued with problems, from mechanical to idiot hackers, it's been a Public Relations nightmare. CERN is still getting calls and emails about the imminent destruction of the planet by the Black holes they hope to create, hopefully once they are up and running spring 2009 they will have a little better luck.

I'll leave you now with a video of Martian Meteorite NWA 4925 taken with my Celestron Digital Microscope.

To Cern With Love

A study called, " Review of the safety of LHC collisions" was just released stating not to worry , everything is going to be okay, we are not going to all be sucked into a black hole when the Large Hadron Collider goes live September 10. To sum it up in a nut shell, the report says we, we being the Earth and other astronomical bodies have been bombarded for billions of years by cosmic rays of far greater energies produced by the LHC and that the ongoing stability of Earth and other astronomical bodies indicates that such collisions cannot be dangerous.

I got a comment on my August 21 post from Jesse stating he was hoping the they are right about the evaporating black hole thing, I had replied stating that we are bombarded daily by cosmic rays of far greater energies that the LHC can produce and that the black holes they produce evaporate, and not to worry, famous last words?, we'll find out soon, I guess a good thing is , if the scientists and my posts are wrong there won't be any one around to tell us we told you so.

Hey while we're on the topic of life sucking black holes, The Center for Astrophysics has just released the coolest, closest image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. By combining telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California they have come up with a winning combination that can detect structure at a tiny angular scale of 37 micro-arcseconds, or the equivalent to a baseball on the surface of the Moon!! Are you thinking what I'm thinking? probably not, my thought processes are a little off, but how cool would that be if they could now take images of the stuff left behind by the Apollo missions? put to rest once and for all whether or not we went there........ people , we did, this would be a way of proving that to all the naysayers.

The Large Hadron Collider has been getting a bad rap lately about the black hole thing and all, below is a good rap of the collider, very interesting and fun all at the same time, enjoy.

Black holes Goes Micro, Cern's LHC Starts Up September 10

In celebration of Cern's Large Hadron Collider, (LHC), going live September 10, 2008 Black holes is going micro, that's right microscopic. I've always been fascinated with the microscopic world and so every once in a while I am going to post some micro images with the help of the Celestron LCD digital microscope.

The above image is what my meteorite that my wife bought me for Christmas looks like under a microscope at 160X magnification, notice the pitting caused by the meteor's travel at more then 30,000 MPH through our atmosphere, if you were to look at it normally it looks and feels very smooth, not so, it's amazing what stuff looks like magnified under a microscope, what's cool is you are looking at a remnant of the building blocks of our solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago.


Mark your calenders September 10 2008, that's the date when they flick a switch, or many, probably many, to send particle beams of protons or heavy ions , called hadrons around a 27 km circular tunnel in opposing directions and then guide the beams to collide into each other.

I know what you're thinking, why would they want to do something like that. Well by smashing particles into each other at such high energies they hope to break down the proton into even more smaller indivisible fundamental particles known to humankind, in essence re-creating the conditions that were present less then a billionth of a second after the big bang.

Have you ever starting reading a book , lets just say for argument sake at page 20?, doesn't work, you have no idea what's going on, nothing makes sense, crap, I start at page 2 I'm screwed, well that's where we started, page 20 in the theory of life book, a lot of things don't make sense, dark energy, dark matter, black holes, we have to get to page 1, the Large Hadron Collider promises to take us there, to page 1 and in doing so will give us the proper background as to why things work the way they do, to understand the big stuff like you, me, and the Universe you have to know how the little stuff works, understand why things are the way they are so as to be able to go forward, build a better mouse trap, to figure out a lot of the crazy stuff that's happening, like are there really more dimensions? what is dark energy? we know there are such things as black holes, or do we, there is no irrefutable proof they exists, they figure they can once and for all prove their existence by creating one every second, mind you it will be a real small one and is supposed to evaporate before it sucks us and the Earth in it, due to a theory called Hawking Radiation. Guess we'll find out September 10.

By understanding how something works puts us one baby step closer to harnessing it's power, "Beam me up Scotty" may one day actually happen.

I like to leave you now with another microscopic image of, well I don't know what it is , what ever it is it was hitching a ride on a rock the size of a pin head, it is at 400x, I like to call it Alien guy with a tail holding a laser gun.

Phoenix Mars Lander's Arrival

Well people they pulled it off, a flawlessly performed landing on the Martian surface at 7:53 pm EDT Sunday May 25th. by the Phoenix Mars Lander. The image above was taken by the onboard telescope from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, it is the lander parachuting to the surface. This was the first successful use of parachutes and thrusters, or what they call a power landing since the Viking missions in 1976.

The Phoenix lander (above image taken by the MRO) has onboard scientific instruments to determine whether ice and water on top of or just below the surface could have ever supported life. NASA'S Mars exploration program has 4 main goals.



1: Determine whether life ever arose on Mars.

2: Characterize the climate of Mars.

3: Characterize the geology of Mars.

4: Prepare for Human exploration.


The Phoenix lander has two main objectives.


1: Study the history of water in the Martian arctic.

2: Search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

I watched NASA TV for most of Sunday, very exciting, my pulse was racing those 7 minutes during descent and landing. Why am I so excited, and why should you care? Baby steps my friends, that's what space exploration is all about, we ain't gonna be warping to some far off galaxy anytime soon, but every little bit of progress helps us, so that one day we can reach for the stars.

I don't just see a lander on Mars gathering ice water, I see a successful completion of a step needed to get us on our way to the outer reaches of the galaxy, nay the universe. Earth is a great place and all, but we only have a limited time before our life supply burns out. Estimates range anywhere from half to a few billion years before our Sun will no longer be able to support us, we have to do what we can to propagate our species, or we can just give up and become extinct.

God gave us all the tools we need to complete this objective; curiosity, intelligence, why else did God create the cosmos?, has to be a reason, so many unanswered questions, so little time. I think we are in exciting times, sure I wish I had been born about 300 years from now, I need more technology, like a Holodeck or Replicator, but with our ever expanding space exploration programs and what I think is the most exciting thing to happen in science in a long time; the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, we are setting ourselves up for some of the greatest discoveries of humankind.

I'll leave you now with an animated Moonrise taken a few days ago.