Cascadia Meteorite Lab
The Cascadia Meteorite Lab at PSU is home to about 2,400 distinct meteorite samples, including meteorites from the asteroid belt and Mars.
WHY IT'S COOL
"Portland State has the largest publicly accessible meteorite collection in the Pacific Northwest,” says Alexander Ruzicka, professor of geology. Ruzicka started the lab in 2003 along with Melinda Hutson, research assistant professor, and Richard Pugh, a teacher at Cleveland High School and meteorite enthusiast. Unlike most other university meteorite collections, which start from a large donation of meteorites, the Cascadia Meteorite Lab began with a single specimen.
Having this collection at Portland State means that PSU students have the unique opportunity to study and classify actual meteorites.
“A good chunk of the meteorite samples are not yet classified so they do not have names,” says Ruzicka. “When a student works on one of these unclassified meteorites, they are the first people to really see what it is. That’s fun and exciting.”
Meteorites are also more than cool rocks from space—they are clues to answering big questions about the universe. “From meteorites, we learn things about the origin and evolution of the solar system,” says Ruzicka. “We don't have any [Earth] rocks from the earliest formation of the Earth—it's all wiped out. If you want to learn about solar system history, it's best actually to look at meteorites.”
GOOD TO KNOW
Ruzicka teaches several space-related courses including Exploring Mars, Astrogeology, Frontiers in Planetary Science, and a seminar on Meteorites.
PSU also offers a Space and Planetary Science Minor for students bitten by the space bug.
FUN FACT
Think you might have found a meteorite? The Cascadia Meteorite Lab offers meteorite identification as a public service (follow these steps first!). The lab receives about a dozen emails a week from people who think they’ve found a meteorite. Ruzicka estimates that only one to two percent of these rocks end up being actual meteorites.
But sometimes the requests pay off in big ways. Recently someone contacted the lab about an unusual rock that they thought might be a meteorite. It turned out to be a rare and unusual lunar meteorite—and the lab’s first moon rock to classify. This single meteorite has sparked a new research path for Ruzicka.
“That's the kind of thing that can happen with meteorites...there's no way that you could launch a mission to the moon to get a rock like this. This is serendipity,” says Ruzicka. “Suddenly we have this really interesting rock, and I've got collaboration started on it, and it's all from this guy contacting us.”