Who's your daddy?

This is a very odd meteorite called Tatahouine. It's made almost entirely of one mineral called pyroxene. Most stony meteorites are made of lots of bits of stone (called chondrules) stuck together. This space rock appears to have come out of a volcano! It doesn't have the isotopic signature of an Earth rock or a Mars rock. It could not come from Venus or Mercury because they are closer to the Sun and it is very difficult for impacts to send meteorites that amount further from the Sun.

And what about that weird name? Sounds familiar? Find out here (and may the force be with you).

So where will you find this little rock's parent? Try the asteroid belt. This is a junk yard of never-made-it planets from a solar system destruction derby.

Can you tell which school someone goes to by looking at them? In the UK it's normally quite easy because most schools have a uniform. You can normally tell which school someone goes to by the colour of their uniform. Now think of the science of light that lets you detect colours. Its all about reflectance and absorption. If an article of your clothing appears blue, what is it doing to light?

White light is made of a rainbow of coloured waves all mixed up. When the mixture hits a coloured surface, some of the coloured waves are absorbed and some of them are reflected.

Meteorites and asteroids also reflect and absorb colours. Which colours are reflected and which are absorbed depends on what the space rock is made of - its version of a school uniform. A detector called a spectrometer can be used to record the reflectance of a meteorite. It produces a graph of the results. Have a look at this graph showing the reflectance spectrum of a piece of the Tatahouine meteorite:

It has a particular shape. The spectrometer can even see waves that are invisible to us, beyond the red part of the spectrum. These waves are called infra red. Tathouine is particularly good at absorbing some infra red wavelengths.

Spectrometers attached to telescopes have recorded reflectance spectra of many asteroids. Try to use some of thes reflecance spectra to find out which asteroid is the "daddy of Tatahouine.

Download a table to record your findings in here (340 KB Word doc.)

Download a PowerPoint version of the main exercise here (187 KB pps)

Here is the line-up of suspects:

Click on each asteroid in turn to find out about the asteroid and to take a spectrograph of it. (most asteroids have never been photographed in detail. Only one of these pictures is an image of the named asteroid)