Project proposal Bright Minds Assistantships February 2022
Utrecht Meteorite Lab
Digitizing the Utrecht Meteorite Collection
Department: Earth Sciences
Research group: Astrobiology / Petrology Supervisor: Dr. Inge Loes ten Kate Email address: i.l.tenkate@uu.nl
Project description
The Department of Earth Sciences has an extensive meteorite collection that is currently only partly used in teaching activities. Inge Loes ten Kate, recently appointed as the curator for the collection, aims to make the collection better accessible for future teaching activities at UU and other institutions. For this we will establish the Utrecht Meteorite Lab, the virtual Utrecht meteorite collection.
The Utrecht Meteorite Lab will be built in close collaboration with the recently established Delft Meteorite Lab at TU Delft Aerospace Engineering (www.delftmeteoritelab.nl). The new Utrecht lab will contain 3D renderings of the Utrecht meteorite collection; these enriched with their respective density and composition data, microscope images of thin sections of selected meteorites and CT scans of selected meteorites. This scope will create a collection complementary to the Delft Meteorite Lab.
This BMA project will help establish the basis of the new collection. The goals of this project are: (I) create 3D models of a selection of the meteorites through Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry, where photographs of the meteorites will be rendered into 3D photorealistic models. An outline to the workflow, the photography setup and a software tutorial are available at the Delft Meteorite Lab. (II) Investigate various non-destructive compositional analysis techniques and analyze the meteorites using these techniques. The outcomes will be validated using the existing literature. Focus will be given to the study of composition and density of a selection of well-studied meteorites. (III) Propose how these data are best represented in a virtual collection. (IV) Design and test a protocol for upscaling to characterize the remainder of the Utrecht collection, based on the research carried out.
The project may be partly affected by Covid-19 closures. Scheduled visits will be arranged in case of limited lab access. When the TU labs will close for non-TU personnel photography will be carried out by TU personnel, alternatively a loan agreement will be put in place to relocate the imaging hardware to UU. If the labs fully close, the lab activities will be canceled. In that case the focus will shift from lab to literature research on the meteorites and the implementation thereof in the virtual collection.
Job requirements
A responsible and conscious working attitude is required to work with these precious materials. In addition, affinity with photography and mineralogical and petrological analyses, and the ability to quickly learn new analytical techniques and adopt workflows with a new software are a pre.
