A large shower of black stones fell over an area of more than 5 square miles. The largest stone weighed about 7kg. The meteorites had a smell like low-grade gasoline, and they had a intense odor indeed when the material was freshly collected. It turned out that the material that fell was of high interest for science on several levels. The Murchison fall is a superb example of organic matter floating around out in space The more than 100 kg of recovered Murchison material have been attacked over the years with just about every instrument of the constantly shifting state of the art in analytical chemistry. The Murchison meteorite contains many amino acids like Glycine which is a non-essential, neutral, genetically coded amino acid. It is the only protein-forming amino acid without a center of chirality..Glycine come in left- and right-handed isomers. It was found out that the Murchison material is slightly biased toward the left-handed isomers, which are the ones that life on Earth is built around. 27.22% SiO, 26.26% FeO, 18.9% MgO, 8.8% H2O+, 3.26%H²O- Fe Total: 20.44% (from weight total) 0.015% Cu, 1.73% NiO, 0.076% CoO, 2.38% SO³, 0.49% S, 0.096% N, Fe only reported as total Fe (Fuchs L. H., Olsen E. and Jensen K. J. (1973) Mineralogy, mineral-chemistry, and composition of the Murchison (C2) meteorite. Smiths. Contrib. Earth Sci., no. 10, 39 pp.) Repository:
40.30kg: Chicago, Field Mus. Nat. Hist. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
