Looking back at history-making chemistry that's out of this world
It was 60 years ago, in 1961, and the space race was on. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, followed weeks later by American astronaut Alan Shepard. President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Arizona State University’s opportunity to become part of the nation’s space program began when it purchased the largest personal meteorite collection at the time from Harvey Nininger. Nininger’s meteorite collection, consisting of samples from nearly 600 localities, was housed and studied at ASU’s newly formed Center for Meteorite Studies, one of the university’s first research institutes.
To direct the center, ASU courted a recent PhD graduate from the California Institute of Technology, Carleton Moore. Moore, at the time, was teaching at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. On behalf of ASU, Herbert G. Fales flew to Connecticut to recruit Moore.
The Center for Meteorite Studies was originally located in the Department of Chemistry (today the School of Molecular Sciences). One of Moore’s first tasks as director was to organize a symposium on meteorite research to celebrate the inauguration of ASU’s new president, G. Homer Durham.
“Durham was a wonderful guy,” Moore said. “He saw that ASU had to grow, so he was very supportive of our research.”
Research at the Center for Meteorite Studies grew throughout the 1960s, as did Moore’s skill and reputation. Prior to the first moon landing in 1969, Moore was accepted by NASA to chemically analyze lunar samples brought back to Earth by the astronauts. A little over 50 years ago, on the evening of Oct. 7, 1969, history was made at ASU in the C-wing of the physical sciences building when Moore, together with colleague Charles Lewis and graduate student Robert Kelly, obtained the first measurements of carbon in a lunar sample.
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Chondrites are the most commonly recovered meteorites, accounting for over 85% of all meteorite falls and finds. They are named for the spherical masses they contain, called chondrules. The terms chondrule and chondrite are derived from the ancient Greek term chondros, meaning grain.
Isheyevo was the first meteorite to show prominent macroscopic sedimentary laminations and, so far, remains the only meteorite that provides evidence of gentle layer-by-layer accretion in the early Solar System. This extends the terrestrial sedimentary source-to-sink paradigm to a near vacuum environment where neither fluvial nor aeolian processes operate.
In this work, Dr. Ray developed a new method to simultaneously purify Fe and Si from a single aliquot of sample while ensuring consistently high yields and accurate and precise isotopic measurements. She then measured the Fe isotope compositions and Si contents of metals from aubrite meteorites to infer the structure and thermal evolution of their asteroidal parent body. Thereafter, she determined the combined Si and Fe isotope compositions of aubrite metals and the Horse Creek iron meteorite, and compared the magnitude of Si and Fe isotope fractionation factors between metal and silicates for both enstatite chondrites and aubrites to estimate the effect of high-temperature core formation that occurred on the aubrite parent body. She additionally assessed whether correlated Si and Fe isotope systematics can be used to trace core formation and partial melting processes for the aubrite parent body, angrite parent body, Mars, Vesta, Moon, and Earth.
