A CURATOR'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROLE AND IMPORTANCE OF CURATED METEORITE SAMPLES IN PLANETARY SCIENCE (Invited Presentation)

The importance of meteorite based sample-science has been the subject of many earlier works, but as a very brief recap: (1) they allow us to investigate the processes occurring in the earliest history of the Solar System, a time not preserved by terrestrial samples; (2) as nature’s sample return missions they take us to places we cannot go, both within our own Solar System, but also within our home planet, e.g., iron meteorites offer us the opportunity to study an actual sample from the core of a differentiated body.

Clearly, meteorites represent a vast resource of information about the evolution of our Solar System, but it is those that lie in curated collections, both private and scientific, that allow us to best tap into that information. While I focus here on meteorite collections, this is also relevant to collections of returned extraterrestrial material, such as Apollo and Hayabusa.

How a meteorite is curated has a huge impact on the subsequent sample-science that can be performed. Ideally, curation not only preserves the sample’s pre-terrestrial past but also a record of its history on earth as this allows a researcher to understand whether it is a suitable subject for their research: e.g., is it a fall or a find, where was it found, how has it been handled and stored, what scientific methods have been applied and what were the results, how much remains. However, it is not just the past history of a meteorite that is important as curated meteorite collections are also essential for the success of future research; the preservation of meteorites and management of their allocation allows for opportunities to apply new and more advanced analytical techniques on samples collected, curated, and studied years earlier. This, in turn generates information that would otherwise have been lost to science and enhances our understanding of the formation and evolution of our Solar System.

Curated collections are also instrumental in helping the scientific community design and plan for sample-return missions. For example, sample-based science allowed us to spectrally link asteroid Bennu, the target of OSIRIS-REx, to carbonaceous chondrites (CI and CM type). These meteorites then provide us with analog material that can be studied in the laboratory to best prepare and plan for the mission and subsequent sample-return.