How to Find and Keep a Space Rock
The rocks and dust that fall to Earth every day from the cosmos have important stories to tell. But these stories are fragile—easily washed away with a soft rain or lost in the jumble of our own planet’s mêlée. Which is why collecting and keeping the rare grains and rocks in just the right way is so important, says Marc Fries, one of NASA’s astromaterials curators.
Fries oversees NASA’s growing collection of space dust. In his free time, he and his wife, Linda Welzenbach Fries—a former meteorite collection manager for the Smithsonian—hunt for freshly fallen space rocks. Both endeavors serve a quest to best preserve information about what our solar system was like when it was forming, some 4.5 billion years ago, and what the cosmos have rained down on our planet over all of these billions of years that might have changed its story.
These days, Fries filtering down into our atmosphere, but also tiny bits of what seem to be broken-down human-made spacecraft—data he hasn’t yet published but is submitting for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this March.
