Meteorite

HAVILAND, Kan. -- Steve Arnold is driving the yellow Hummer in circles around a Kiowa County wheat field, towing an 18-foot-wide metal detector. For an hour, nothing but silence. Finally, the detector whines, and Arnold slams the brakes. "That is so good," he says. Arnold jumps out, pinpoints the location with a smaller detector and starts digging. The renowned meteorite hunter is hoping for a big score. He has had three false hits today, unearthing a bit of barbed wire, a fragment of a plow, a squashed Dr Pepper can. "What's the definition of insanity?"

Looking for an out-of-this-world conversation starter for your den? A hefty chunk of space debris made a brief stop in Owings Mills yesterday on its way to New York to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold brought his 1,400-pound find to Direct Dimensions, an Owings Mills-based 3-D imaging company, to gather precise measurements of its mottled exterior. The meteorite - a chunk of interplanetary debris that falls to the earth's surface - is an "oriented pallasite," composed of iron and olivine, a semiprecious gemstone known as peridot.

ON THE INDIAN RIVER -- "Tide has us now," announces the man tucked into a faded orange kayak. "It'll take us right around the island.""Delmarva" Dennis Littleton dunks his tan, wide-brimmed hat into the bay waters. (Kayaking should begin with the cooling of a hot head.) Husks of rotting horseshoe crabs litter the put-in point, as Littleton's tour group begins its circumnavigation of Burton's Island.The 44-year-old Littleton ("I know, I look younger") knows Burton's Island like the back of his kayak.

The Martians of summer are facing a hard winter. Their very survival is in question.New research has cast a cold shadow over the sensational claims made in August that a meteorite that fell on Antarctica carried chemical and possibly fossil evidence of primitive life on early Mars -- microbial Martians.The possibility revived speculation about life on other worlds, an idea ever latent in science and the human imagination, and seemed to provide additional impetus for projects to explore the neighboring planet, including two American spacecraft now on their way.But independent tests conducted since the meteorite announcement have shown that the supposed evidence for Martian life can be explained in nonbiological terms, scientists said.

IS THERE nothing without a political propensity these days? There is something strongly suspicious about the sudden discovery of minuscule, primordial life on Mars. It comes at a time when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is fighting for its fiscal life with a conservative Congress.One might question how long NASA has been sitting on this one, using it possibly as a wild card in a poker game, a get-out-of-jail-free ticket in a turn of Monopoly.The announcement has set in motion, among some, a tumult to race to Mars to find other millions of years old pieces of life -- if, indeed, there ever was life on Mars.

Pastor Ed Simpson was at the pulpit of Harvester Baptist Church in Columbia yesterday morning, talking about God's calling, about the sacrifices of missionary life, about Mars."

When NASA scientists announced this summer that they had found possible signs of primitive life in a Martian meteorite, people again faced a question that has haunted mankind since the dawn of consciousness: What's in it for me?Soon enough a response came from a meteorite dealer and a New York auction house: money. But that was only part of the solution.Today we stand at the threshold of a great discovery. Meteorite collectors await word from Guernsey's auction house in Manhattan, hopeful of unlocking a mystery that for millenniums has sparked man's mercantile imagination: How much?

THE CHESAPEAKE region may seem like an eternal place, an endless dance of light and water, mists and grasses, swamps and forests.But as scientists learn more about the forces that shape the Earth, it's becoming clear just how accidental and transient the estuary and the land that embraces it really are.It's long been understood, of course, that this corner of the middle Atlantic has been sculpted by the rise of the Appalachians to the west, meltwater from...

Q: How can I find out more about Nippon marked china?A: Write the International Nippon Collectors' Club c/o Phil Fernkes, 112 Oak Ave. North, Owatonna, Minn. 55060. It offers an annual membership and informative bimonthly newsletter for $20. Or call (507) 451-4960 for information.Q: I have a bunch of original McDonald's stir rods from years ago. How can I find out more about them, and where can I take them to sell?A: Send a photocopy of the stirrers (which may be rare) to McDonald Collector, P.O. Box 83, Winnetka, Ill. 60093, enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply or cash offer.

OKAZAKI, Japan -- A meteorite that crashed through the roof of a home in Mihonoseki in December probably was a piece of the same space object as a falling star that landed in Japan more than a thousand years ago, researchers say.The earlier meteorite descended on Nogata City in western Japan in 861. The second hit Shimane Prefecture, 185 miles away and 1,132 years later.Masako Shima and Keisuke Nagao of the National Science Museum at Okayama University told a conference in Okazaki City that chemical analysis suggested the Mihonoseki meteorite was 61 million years old, compared to the Nogata meteorite's estimated 60 million years.

With chunks of meteorites fetching thousands of dollars on the commercial market, news of the spectacular meteor that soared over parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania early Monday has touched off a cosmic treasure hunt. Professional meteorite hunters and collectors are scrambling to track down, grab (or buy if they must) any pieces of the Mason-Dixon meteor that might have survived the fall to Earth. "This is the Super Bowl," Steve "Meteorite Man" Arnold said Wednesday night after flying in from Arkansas to join the hunt.

Scientists drilling into the site where a giant meteorite smashed into the lower Chesapeake Bay millions of years ago have found one more surprise amid the microscopic life and pockets of prehistoric ocean. The water is saltier than expected - and no one is sure why. "It's not a reservoir. It's water in pores and in cracks and shattered rocks," said Ward Sanford, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists have been examining the bay impact crater since its discovery in 1993.

HAVILAND, Kan. -- Steve Arnold is driving the yellow Hummer in circles around a Kiowa County wheat field, towing an 18-foot-wide metal detector. For an hour, nothing but silence. Finally, the detector whines, and Arnold slams the brakes. "That is so good," he says. Arnold jumps out, pinpoints the location with a smaller detector and starts digging. The renowned meteorite hunter is hoping for a big score. He has had three false hits today, unearthing a bit of barbed wire, a fragment of a plow, a squashed Dr Pepper can. "What's the definition of insanity?"

Looking for an out-of-this-world conversation starter for your den? A hefty chunk of space debris made a brief stop in Owings Mills yesterday on its way to New York to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold brought his 1,400-pound find to Direct Dimensions, an Owings Mills-based 3-D imaging company, to gather precise measurements of its mottled exterior. The meteorite - a chunk of interplanetary debris that falls to the earth's surface - is an "oriented pallasite," composed of iron and olivine, a semiprecious gemstone known as peridot.

Scientists are rethinking their theories about the Chesapeake Bay impact crater after they drilled deeper into it than ever before and found something unexpected: a huge slab of granite. Over several months, crews penetrated 5,795 feet at a site about five miles north of Cape Charles, Va. They're trying to piece together what happened 35 million years ago, when a meteorite smashed into what is now the mouth of the bay. The mile-wide meteorite incinerated everything in its path and created a tsunami when it splashed into the sea, leaving a hole the size of Rhode Island.

METEOR CRATER, Ariz. -- About 50,000 years ago, a fireball streaked across the sky at 11 miles per second and crashed into the desert here, triggering a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. The meteorite was 150 feet wide and weighed 300,000 tons. In less than 10 seconds, it sent 175 million tons of material flying miles in all directions. The blast killed all the animal life -- mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths and bison -- within several miles.

In an expedition worthy of Indiana Jones, a team of NASA scientists left Maryland this week to search a South American jungle for traces of a fallen "star." Investigators from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt are heading this weekend into a steaming Bolivian jungle, patrolled by jaguars, snakes and piranha, to join Bolivian colleagues at a place called Iturralde Crater. Barely discernible even from the air, this five-mile-wide circle in the forest may be the bull's-eye where a hurtling asteroid or comet struck with the force of a thousand hydrogen bombs.

This, The New York Times reported last week, was her first hockey game. He was a New York Rangers fan who had sat several times in the cheaper seats near the ceiling at Madison Square Garden. But when somebody gave Laszlo Tokolyi two tickets in the seventh row near one of the nets, he persuaded his wife, Gyongyi, to go see the Rangers play the Detroit Red Wings on March 17. A handyman, Tokolyi does not often get $120 seats to see the Rangers face the best team in the NHL. "OK, let's go," she said she told him. "I'll see how it's going to be. I don't really like hockey, but my husband said, `Oh, you should come because it's going to be good.

Dale Pearce took a rock to work Tuesday and told his co-workers it fell out of the sky Saturday night, and he found it in the woods behind his Pasadena home. Sure, Dale. They didn't believe him at first. But Pearce may get the last laugh. The plum-sized rock that he says blazed out of the sky and smacked into the ground behind the Pasadena Crossroads Shopping Center has been identified by a NASA scientist as a genuine stony meteorite. Pearce and his rock were due at the Smithsonian Institution this morning, where experts will cut a slice from it to confirm and classify the discovery.

NEW YORK - In a compromise that seeks to balance scientific inquiry with cultural tradition, the American Museum of Natural History and an Indian group from Oregon have agreed that the 15.5-ton Willamette Meteorite will remain a centerpiece of the museum's new center for earth and space. The brownish iron meteorite, the largest ever discovered in the continental United States, will continue to rest on its steel pedestal in the Cullman Hall of the Universe. But in addition to a plaque describing the scientific background of the giant rock, which scientists believe plummeted to earth 10,000 years ago from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, there will be a second display describing its history and importance as a Native American religious object.