Category: Article

Tags

    Published: January 5, 2012

    New Kenyan Meteorite Thika Donated

    Philipp Heck, Sr. Director, Negaunee Integrative Research Center; Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies; Head, Robert A. Pritzker Center, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

    The Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies is proud to announce the newest addition to the meteorite collection.  The newly named meteorite Thika, recently classified as a L6 ordinary chondrite, was donated to the Center by Collections and Research Committee member Terry Boudreaux in mid-September.  Falling on the morning of July 16, this bright fireball was observed traveling from southern Kenya to the northwest.  Residents in the Thika District in Kiambu County reported loud explosions and screaming noises.  The first piece weighing about 2.5 kg fell within a meter of a woman tilling her field!  Greenhouses were smashed in the village of Mwana Wikio and a house was damaged in nearby Muguga village.   It was in the village of Muguga where, on August 8, Leah Mjoki found the 36 gram piece that would later make its way into The Field Museum’s collection.  Thika belongs to a class of meteorites called ordinary chondrites, but, Collections Manager James Holstein (Geology) says, “There is nothing ordinary in what they can teach us.  We can learn about asteroids and our Solar System’s history by studying the petrology and chemistry of these meteorites.  For example, we can determine how large the meteoroid was before it entered Earth's atmosphere, when it broke away from its parent body and how long it took the meteorite to reach Earth.”

    Philipp Heck
    Sr. Director, Negaunee Integrative Research Center; Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies; Head, Robert A. Pritzker Center

    Philipp R. Heck serves as the Senior Director of Research at the Field Museum. Research at the Field Museum is conducted in the areas of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Life Sciences, Anthropology and Archeology, and is united in the Negaunee Integrative Research Center. Heck is the Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL in the Science & Education department and a Professor (part time) at the University of Chicago's Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College (https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/philipp-heck/). 

    Heck's research focuses on presolar grains to understand our parent stars and the history of our Galaxy, early solar system materials, asteroids, and on the delivery history of extraterrestrial matter to Earth. For his research he studies the mineralogy and geochemistry of meteorites, micrometeorites and space-mission returned samples and also of fossil meteorites and micrometeorites found in Earth's sedimentary record. Heck joined the sample analysis team of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission. Heck was a member of the international research consortium to find and study the first modern interstellar dust returned by NASA's Stardust Mission. Heck is an executive committee member of the Extraterrestrial Materials Analysis Group (ExMAG) and is chairing the Microparticle Subcommittee.

    As the curator in charge, Philipp R. Heck oversees the collection of meteorites at the recently established Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, the largest meteorite collection housed at a private institution with more than 12000 specimens and more than 1600 different meteorites. Other responsibilities include the curation of the gem, mineral, rock and economic geology collections.


    Philipp R. Heck came to the Field Museum in March 2010 from the University of Chicago, where he was a postdoctoral scholar working on new analytical techniques for presolar grains. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at ETH Zurich in Switzerland in geo- and cosmochemistry. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry where he studied the first comet dust brought back from Comet Wild-2 by NASA’s Stardust Mission and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he worked mainly on fossil meteorites and banded iron formations from around the world. For his studies he uses specialized analytical techniques such as secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS, IMS-1280 and TOF-SIMS), noble gas mass spectrometry, atom probe tomography, scanning electron microscopy and electron microprobe analysis. Sample preparation for atom-probe work is performed with focused ion beam workstations.