Every austral summer, a group of volunteers heads off to a remote region of Antarctica to set up a field camp on the ice. For the next month, they search the ice and nearby debris piles left by glaciers for dark rocks that might be extraterrestrial in origin. The program is called the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET).
ANSMET has been led for the past 20 years by geologist Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports field operations, NASA curates the recovered meteorites, and the Smithsonian Institution provides long-term curation facilities for the collection.
Over the years many Washington University in St. Louis geologists, physicists and astrophysicists have volunteered to help. This year it was the turn of Christine Floss, PhD, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences.
Read the full story in The Source: Hunting for Meteorites.