Full set of meteorites found by the First Antarctic Meteorite Expedition of Ural Federal University arrives in Ekaterinburg

The long-awaited, approximately 30 kg package from the Antarctic has arrived in Ekaterinburg today, on June 15, and was delivered to the “Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies” research and educational center of Ural Federal University.

“A lot of research is ahead”, says the Professor of UrFU Institute of Physics and Technology Victor Grokhovsky. “We have already done a good job with the first samples, which our team brought back in January. They are very interesting – we hadn’t had the chance to study such kinds of meteorites before in our laboratory”.

According to Prof. Grokhovsky, the first Antarctic samples, LOM 15001 and LOM 15002 (named after the place of finding, the Lomonosov mountains), were classified as aerolites: one of them, containing a lot of metal, is a chondrite, while the other does not contain any chondrules, but has a small piece of metal in its very center. This means that the matter of cosmic bodies is very diverse, and there are many surprises waiting for us. Moreover, it is a much easier way to obtain extraterrestrial matter.

After the study of the material is finished, the UrFU scientists are going to apply for registration of the meteorites in the International Meteoritic Nomenclature Committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Reference

The First UrFU Antarctic Meteorite Expedition consisting of six young scientists form Ekaterinburg and Perm searched for meteorites on the southernmost continent for the first time in the history of modern Russia. The scientific leader of the expedition is UrFU Professor Victor Grokhovsky.

The first meteorite was identified right in the field on December 31, 2015. Two days later, the expedition found another one.

The scientists brought the two samples to Ekaterinburg on January 18. The rest arrived by the “Academic Fedorov” expeditionary ship in Saint Petersburg on May 31 together with participants of the 61st Russian Antarctic Expedition. There, the scientists took the blue ice, which contains cosmic dust, to the B.P. Konstantinov St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute for study.

The Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, (formed by a merger of the Ural State Technical University and Ural State University) is one of the leading educational institutions in the Ural region. Ural Federal University acts as a research and innovation center of the Ural region and has close cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences. Training of students is carried out in four main areas of knowledge and 108 academic majors. The links between the university and intermediate educational institutions are actively developed. The University also performs consistent work on establishing strategic partnership with employers for the sake of development of the regional economy: employers are involved in the educational environment as direct participants, large-scale enployers-sponsored and corporate education is carried out based on the client-centered approach, joint business projects in economic and social areas are realized.

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This release was published on openPR.