dweir's Meteorite Studies

dweir presents
METEORITES: A Systematic Classification Through Photographs
Where Splitters and Lumpers find common ground

*** 28 Years on the World Wide Web ***

The opportunity is at hand to investigate the surface of Mars and obtain ground truth for martian meteorites.

Zagami, martian shergottite Nakhla, martian nakhlite Chassigny, martian chassignite

21 g cut fragment, coarse lith. 1.9 g cut fragment 0.76 g cut fragment

Fell October 3, 1962 Fell June 28, 1911 Fell October 3, 1815

click on photos for a magnified view (photos not shown at the same scale)

Thanks for visiting my website, updated regularly since May 1997

Employing

internal site search
now indexing 481 document pages containing 10.3 MB of data

TIP: type the current or any previous year (e.g., 2010) in the site search box to see a list of referenced updates for that year

griffith observatory star awards

~ PREMIÈRE SHOWING ~

Lennon Bradley's
The Breakup of Antaeus

Previous Features:
Dr. Jay Piatek's PALLASITES: A Rare View
Kevin Kichinka's The Rise of the Raj and the Fall of Shergotty (pdf format)

Ureilites are finally figured out! read more >>

NEW DEFINITIONS FOR METEORITE-RELATED TERMS (now includes the NEW definition of "planet")

NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE HISTORIC NAKHLA DOG REPORT

A new jewel from the Sahara, NWA 8535: The first dunitic angrite
Is this a piece of "Maia", mother of Hermes (Mercury), or possibly a piece of "Theia", mother of Selene (the Moon goddess)? read more >>

Photo courtesy of Habib Naji–click on photo for a magnified view

Think you've found a meteorite? read more >>

Was it launched from Mercury?
See Indicators of a Mercurian Meteorite
Congratulations Stefan Ralew for discovering the van Gogh of meteorites!

NWA 7325
click on photo for a magnified view and read more >>

Perhaps you have a meteorite sample from Uranus or Neptune... read more >>

Pluto Walk, Lowell Observatory
Flagstaff, Arizona

click on photo for a magnified view

This photo was taken September 1990 in Flagstaff, Arizona during a chance meeting between Doug Hollis and myself with Clyde Tombaugh and his wife Patricia. They happened to be visiting the observatory, from which he discovered the ninth planet Pluto, to make their first stroll together down the newly constructed Pluto Walk. The photo was shared with Clyde and received his signature in May 1992.

Congratulations Clyde Tombaugh on your historic visit to Pluto!

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured the above high-resolution enhanced color images of Pluto and Charon on July 14, 2015. The Pluto and Charon images resolve details as small as 0.8 miles and 1.8 miles, respectively. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

The image below depicts every know planet in the solar system under 10,000 km in diameter (shown to scale), based on the geophysical definition of a planet proposed by Runyon et al., 48th LPSC, #1448 (2017). The known planets currently number ~110.

click on photo for a magnified view

HAPPY 4,568,360,000th BIRTHDAY TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM!
(Desch et al., 2023)

Our Current Solar System

click on photo for a magnified view

My thanks to the many dedicated investigators whose ongoing research provides the basis for this website. Some of the sources utilized for this website are not peer-reviewed.

Thanks to Joe who introduced his six-year-old brother to meteoritics when he revealed the "impact pit" in the backyard, complete with a melted, bubbly "meteorite" (slag) at the bottom (note: image below is only the representation of a memory).

This website and all of its content, unless otherwise noted, is Copyright protected © 1997–2025 by David Weir. This is an educational site intended for your personal or classroom use in pursuing meteorite studies.