, which will not hit our planet in 2014 as originally advertised. Over the last two decades, these space rock researchers have boosted their knowledge of how asteroids form, their role in planet formation and their impact on Earth and to showcase these studies, curators at the American Museum of Natural History here will reopen the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites to the public Sept. 20 after a six-month renovation project.
"It's very strongly theme-driven, less by the classification of these space rocks than by what the meteorites tell us," said Denton Ebel, a geologist and exhibit curator at the museum.
Meteorites are the end result of rocks that have cruised through space only to enter Earth's atmosphere - when their bright streaks become "meteors" - and crash down on the surface - when they become "meteorites."
Originally opened in 1981, the Hall of Meteorites contains more than 130 space rock samples chosen from more than 5,000 specimens currently held by the museum. The revamped exhibit is now split into three sections - Origins, Planets and Impacts - to illustrate the asteroid lifecycle from beginning to end and the implications for Earth.
The centerpiece of the exhibit, both figuratively and literally, is the iron Ahnighito, a 32-ton fragment from the Cape York meteorite discovered in Greenland in 1897. The fragment is so massive, museum officials said, that it was originally brought in on tracks through the museum wall. Its supports go down through the floor into the bedrock of Manhattan.
Other highlights include a five meteorites from Mars, themselves caused by a space rocks that slammed into the red planet, as well as a trio of Moon rocks collected by NASA astronauts during the Apollo program. A seven-minute video narrated by Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, and scale-model diorama of Meteor Crater in Arizona are also included in the exhibit.
"Meteorites are like fossils, formed billions of years ago when the Solar System was still young," Ebel said. "If you could cool a piece of the Sun and hold it in your hand, you would be holding some of these meteorites."
The study of meteorites not only helps researchers piece together what conditions were like when Sun and planets coalesced from stellar gas 4.5 billion years ago, but also the properties of older regions of space. Microscopic diamonds formed during supernovae explosions, then blown into the Solar System before the Sun began to shine are also included renovated exhibit. These nano-diamonds, as researchers called them, were pulled from fragments of the Allende meteorite that rained down in 1969 near the Pueblito de Allende in northern Mexico.
"That's the whole reason why this hall had to be renovated," said Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, an astrophysicist and associate curator at the museum. "Twenty years ago we didn't know that these nano-diamonds even existed, or that we could find rocks from Mars here on Earth. We've only realized all this in the last decade."
On a more local note, the updated meteorite exhibit also includes part of the football-sized Peekskill meteorite that fell to Earth in 1992. The rock's Earthward plummet ended in Peekskill, New York, where it crashed into the trunk of a parked Chevy Malibu.
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