The Murchison Meteorite A Scientific Treasure Trove

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The Murchison Meteorite A Scientific Treasure Trove


The Murchison Meteorite A Scientific Treasure Trove

Dr. Philipp R. Heck
Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL in the Science & Education division

 

Date & Time

Wednesday 25th September, 2019
6:00pm to 7:30pm


 

Venue

Fritz Loewe Theatre: McCoy Building,
University of Melbourne,
253-275 Elgin Street Carlton, VIC 3053


 
Since its fall near Murchison, Victoria in 1969, the Murchison meteorite has been the source of numerous spectacular discoveries. Thanks to the large amount recovered and its availability to the scientific community, the Murchison meteorite is one of the most studied carbonaceous chondrites.

The main fraction of Murchison was acquired by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and since has been curated there. Associate Professor Philipp Heck will give an overview of Murchison curation and highlight some of the most important discoveries made by studying Murchison in the last 50 years.

Associate Professor Philipp Heck’s research interests include meteorites and their components (in particular presolar grains and CAIs), micrometeorites, and cosmic dust. Heck and his collaborators study these samples with the following techniques: noble gas mass spectrometry, atom-probe tomography, SIMS, NanoSIMS, SEM, FIB-SEM, Raman spectroscopy, Q-LA-ICPMS, and uCT. Heck currently teaches the accretion of extraterrestrial matter to Earth, research and reading. Heck curates the meteorite, rock and mineral collection at the Field Museum of Natural History


 

About the presenter

Dr. Philipp R. Heck is the Robert A. Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL in the Science & Education division. He is also an Associate Professor (part time) at the University of Chicago’s Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College and a member of the Chicago Center for Cosmochemistry.

Dr. Heck directs the research program in meteoritics at the Field Museum currently focuses on presolar grains to understand our parent stars and the history of our Galaxy, early solar system materials and on the delivery history of extra-terrestrial matter to Earth.

Dr. 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.


 

Registration

Please register for the event here.


 

More information

Ben Juppbjupp@srk.com.au
Download the event flyer.

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