Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:
That report is completely wrong. Not only is it impossible for a piece of Mir to be found in that location, what he is holding isn't space junk (and Mir wasn't made of stone!). What he is holding is a textbook example of glassy slag, the most common kind, which is found everywhere. Whoever the mystery person an NASA who supposedly identified this is, he knows absolutely nothing about terrestrial geology, meteorites (and meteorwrongs), or the orbital dynamics of Mir.

geckzilla wrote:
Sounds like a gag has gotten out of hand for this poor guy.

geckzilla wrote:
Well, yeah. She's not the one who's going to be heartbroken to find that a beloved melted space earth mir rock is just a piece of industrial waste. She just has to deal with the mistake of helping to perpetuate the thing which is the status quo for the press anyway.

geckzilla wrote:
He takes it to school for show and tell with the kids.

geckzilla wrote:
I think he's rather happy with its status as a part of Mir. Finding a piece of Mir would be kind of like winning the lottery.

neufer wrote: I think Mr.Green was rather happy with his rock sitting next to that old anchor.

geckzilla wrote:
That was before he had someone from NASA (supposedly) tell him it was something more exotic. Thinking about it again, maybe he just made the story up himself since the details are kind of vague and don't match with what we know someone at NASA might really say. Even assuming some random NASA guy knew diddly about meteorites, he would have been smart enough to ask someone who knew better. You could ask someone who knows nothing about meteorites and they might say it's a space rock but not a piece of Mir. Who made this crap up?

geckzilla wrote:
Edit: Should I mail her on behalf of the passengers of the Starship Asterisk*?
Because I would have never come to these conclusions, otherwise.

neufer wrote:Chris brought it up and should have first dibs but I sincerely doubt that Lauren hasn't already been told.

neufer wrote: Being an ex-NOAA guy, myself, I cannot really discuss NASA personnel in an unbiased fashion.

geckzilla wrote:Hmm, is it a bad kind of bias or a good kind of bias? And why did you post this video, anyway? Did you know it was a fraud straight away?

geckzilla wrote:

neufer wrote:
Being an ex-NOAA guy, myself, I cannot really discuss NASA personnel in an unbiased fashion.

Hmm, is it a bad kind of bias or a good kind of bias?

geckzilla wrote:
And why did you post this video, anyway? Did you know it was a fraud straight away?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud wrote:
<<Fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual;
a hoax also involves deception, but without the intention of gain or of damaging or depriving the victim.>>

• Now....Stratford upon Avon...that's a fraud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthplace wrote:
<<"The Birthplace" is a short story by Henry James, first published in his collection The Better Sort in 1903. The story reflects James's skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Morris Gedge is a librarian at a dull provincial library in England that is "all granite, fog and female fiction." He gets a welcome offer to become the custodian of the Shakespeare house at Stratford-on-Avon. (Although Shakespeare's name is never mentioned in the story it's obvious to whom "the supreme Mecca of the English-speaking race" is devoted.) Once installed as the custodian, Morris begins to doubt the chatter he is forced to give to tourists who visit the home. He starts to qualify and hesitate in his spiel. This brings anguish to his wife and a warning from the shrine's proprietors. Gedge finally decides that if silliness is what's wanted, he'll supply it abundantly. The last section of the story shows him delivering a hilarious lecture on how the child Shakespeare played around the house. Of course, receipts from tourists increase and Gedge gets a raise.>>

geckzilla wrote:
Fine, fine, fraud, hoax, simple ignorance, whichever! None of this matters anymore because I've just confirmed that Neufer got fooled and I'm just making this post to reiterate that fact.

http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2013/06/20/minnesota-couple-finds-33-pound-space-rock-in-their-cornfield/ wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Bruce and Nelva Lilienthal with their new-found iron meteorite. It was found on their farm in Arlington, Minnesota about an hour southwest of Minneapolis. Credit: Sheri Alexander.[/color][/b]

---

Minnesota couple finds 33-pound space rock in their cornfield
Astrobob, June 20, 2013

<<Bruce Lilienthal has picked a lot of rocks from his cornfield in southern Minnesota but none like the 15 kg rusty slab he recently saw poking out of the soil. The odd, flat rock not only caught his eye but was unusually heavy for its size.

Bruce suspected it might be a meteorite so he called an expert with a description and then got a hold of Dr. Calvin Alexander, Earth Sciences professor and curator of meteorites at the University of Minnesota. Alexander drove out to the farm to visit Bruce and his wife Nelva.

“It has a very unusual shape,” said Alexander. The Lilienthals allowed him to remove a 0.6-gram sample in four small pieces. Back at the university, Alexander placed a fragment in an electron microprobe, a specialized instrument that determines the chemical makeup of a substance by bombarding it with beams of electrons. When excited by the little buggers [sick], each element emits X-rays of a particular energy with a unique fingerprint.

The professor’s eyes must have lit up when he saw the results – the crumbs contained 8 percent nickel, an element rare in Earth rocks but common in meteorites and frequently used to tell the two apart. Not only that, but the specimen flashed the telltale criss-cross pattern of interwoven iron-nickel crystals called the Widmanstatten pattern, unique to iron meteorites.

But what about that shape – why so flat? In the early solar system, nonstop meteorite impacts and heat from the decay of radioactive elements melted the larger asteroids, causing heavier materials like iron to sink to the core and lighter rocks to float to the surface and eventually harden into crust. Most iron meteorites originate in the cores of asteroids torn asunder by impacts from other asteroids. Not this one. “It didn’t form in the interior,” said Alexander. “The object’s unusual shape indicates it probably formed as a thin layer or pool of melted surface rock created in an asteroid collision.”

Nelva describes two other meteorites found three miles either side of their cornfield. Indeed, in 1894 a farmer plowed up a similar flat stone weighing 8.9 kg named Arlington and classified as a rare II-E anomalous iron meteorite. Translation: it probably formed as melted surface rock instead of inside the asteroid’s core. The bulk of this rock forms part of the University of Minnesota collection currently curated by the Smithsonian. “I’m 99 percent sure it’s the same as Arlington,” said Alexander, who hopes to acquire the piece for the university’s collection and put it on display. If it does turn out to be one and the same, it will likely be named ‘Arlington II’.

For now, Bruce and Nelva haven’t decided exactly what to do with their new-found rock from space. Wherever it ends up, they can say they’ve cradled a rock from the asteroid belt as old as the solar system itself thanks to their cornfield’s cosmic connections.>>

neufer wrote:

http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2013/06/20/minnesota-couple-finds-33-pound-space-rock-in-their-cornfield/ wrote:
Minnesota couple finds 33-pound space rock in their cornfield
Astrobob, June 20, 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedrite wrote:

<<Octahedrites are the most common structural class of iron meteorites. The structures occur because the meteoric iron has a certain Nickel concentration that leads to the exsolution of kamacite out of taenite while cooling.

Octahedrites derive their name from the crystal structure paralleling an octahedron. Opposite faces are parallel so, although an octahedron has 8 faces, there are only 4 sets of kamacite plates.

Due to a long cooling time in the interior of the parent asteroids, these alloys have crystallized into intermixed millimeter-sized bands (from about 0.2 mm to 5 cm). When polished and acid etched the classic Widmanstätten patterns of intersecting lines of lamellar kamacite, are visible.

In gaps between the kamacite and taenite lamellae, a fine-grained mixture called plessite is often found. An iron nickel phosphide, schreibersite, is present in most nickel-iron meteorites, as well as an iron-nickel-cobalt carbide, cohenite.>>