Monday, December 28, 2015

NASA scientists went to the South Pole to look for meteorites – RIA Novosti

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 Member of the third expedition Adm. Richard Byrd Antarctica

© AP Photo

MOSCOW, December 28 – RIA Novosti . The team of geologists sponsored by NASA went to Antarctica as part of another expedition ANSMET, whose main goal is to find the fragments of meteorites that fell in the vicinity of the South Pole of the Earth over the past 20 million years, the website ANSMET.

“Meteorites that we find in the Antarctic, will help us understand the way there and the solar system formed. These “heavenly stones” come to us, having come off from the surface of other planets, their moons and asteroids, not all of which NASA may visit, using the rovers and probes. This gives us a great chance to collect and study material from other planets without leaving Earth, “- said Nina Lanza (Nina Lanza), the head of a new expedition.

Expeditions ANSMET held and organized by NASA and the National Science Foundation US in 1976 for the collection and cataloging of meteorites falling on Antarctic territory, mainly in the eastern part of the icy continent. Over the past 39 years, scientists have been able to find and explore over 20 thousand fragments of “heavenly stones”, some of which, such as the Martian meteorite ALH84001, became real celebrities.

In addition to the American ANSMET, a number of other countries in the world maintain their own Program Search for Meteorites in Antarctica. Scientists are looking for fallen fragments of asteroids and particles of Martian or lunar soil in its territory for two simple reasons.

First, the entire surface of the continent covered snow white snow and ice that help geologists find “heavenly stones”, without fear that they may not be meteorites and ordinary boulders from the earth. Secondly, meteorites, “stuck” inside the ice sheet, may periodically go to the surface at a time when the glacier, “current” in the direction of the coast of Antarctica, is faced with the backbone of the Transantarctic Mountains.

Every year, these cracks in glaciers and snow of Antarctica give scientists around 500 “fresh” meteorite. This year, the expedition arrived in Antarctica in mid-December, and for the past two weeks has managed to find some interesting meteorite – only on Christmas Day, Dec. 24, scientists were able to find 81 in a similar meteorite collision points of the glacier and the mountains. As geologists hope, they will be able to break the record last year.

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