The Center for Meteorite Studies is pleased to announce that Mary
Sue Bell, a graduate student at the University of Houston and a senior
scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center, and Anat Shahar, a graduate
student at UCLA are the dual recipients of the 2007 Nininger Meteorite
Award!

 The Nininger Meteorite Award recognizes outstanding student
achievement in the “Science of Meteoritics” as embodied by an original
research paper.

The Center participated in the Sally Ride Festival, which features a Street Fair filled with science and engineering displays and hands-on activities and Discovery Workshops where girls learn from local scientists, doctors and engineers!

The Sally Ride Festival celebrates science and engineering.

Recent modeling by a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory suggests that the impactor responsible for the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia, Russia was smaller than previously thought. His findings have implications for the true destructive capabilities of Earth-impacting bodies. Details of his findings can be found here.

In the early hours of January 29, Earth will get a close (~344,000 miles) flyby by Near-Earth Asteroid 2007 TU24. 2007 TU24, discovered only in October 2007, will not affect Earth but it will provide observers with moderately-sized telescopes a great view. Sky location and viewing information can be found here.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University

The Center for Meteorite Studies at the Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration has an opening for a Postdoctoral Fellow. The successful candidate will be expected to participate in research in the area of cosmochemistry.

Nicolas Ouellette, ASU

The Center for Meteorite Studies is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2006 Nininger Meteorite Award is Nicolas Ouellette, a graduate student working with Steven Desch and Jeff Hester at Arizona State University. Nicolas was among ten undergraduate and graduate students from across the country who submitted papers to the 2006 Nininger Meteorite Award competition. Each submission was reviewed by a panel of experts from a broad array of fields in meteoritical science. The panel cited Nicolas’s paper, entitled “Injection of Supernova Dust into the Protoplanetary Disk” for its exciting and innovative combination of astronomical observations, meteorite isotope chemistry measurements and modeling results to address the origin and distribution of short-lived radionuclides in the Solar System.

CMS Founding Director Carleton Moore is among a handful of scientists featured in the ASU Archives exhibit "ASU Science Pioneers 1955-1970". The exhibit also features Harvey H. Nininger, the meteorite scientist and hunter from whom ASU purchased the foundation of its meteorite collection. The Archives recently began curating Nininger's papers. In conjunction with the exhibit, the Archives created a video podcast discussing these science pioneers.