On Friday the 20th of January, kids from the elective Astronomy class I teach undertook one of our favorite activities in the course: Hunting the streets of Flushing for micrometeorites. I ordered a small (and I do mean small) set of rare earth (neodymium) magnets. They were about a quarter inch square by an inch long. I was worried that they wouldn’t have a strong enough field to attract the particles we were looking for. I was reassured when Gunnar (a graduate apprentice teacher I’m working with) and I managed to each find examples in just a few sweeps near the school building’s entrance.
The next day, kids braved the chilly temperatures, fanning out along the sidewalk adjacent to the school. We were fortunate in that the snow held off long enough to afford us unencumbered access to the cracks in the sidewalk where micrometeorites seem to accumulate.
Back inside, we transferred the metallic debris attracted to the magnets onto packing tape. Folding a non-sticky tab makes maneuvering the specimen way easier under the scope, and leaves a convenient place for kids to mark their names with permanent markers when waiting for imaging.
The kids all struggled a bit to find the meteorites, but sure enough, every single piece of tape we looked at had at least one (and many several) of the characteristically pitted metallic spheres. Some day, I’d like to get a university around here to try running one through a mass spectrophotometer, just to see if we could quantify the Fe-Ni composition, and thus classify the type of meteorite the sample originated from.
Until then, we enjoyed a great day outside doing a little bit of hands-on astronomy!