Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The fall of the Tagish Lake (B.C.) meteorite onto the frozen surface of the lake of the same name in January of 2000 was widely publicized; its preliminary study in the following months showed that the meteorite is a unique type of carbonaceous chondrite - a type of meteorite that represents the primordial material from which the solar system formed. Tagish Lake is the most carbon-rich carbonaceous chondrite, containing up to 6 % carbon by weight; almost half this amount is in the form of primitive organic molecules that formed in interstellar space or on the asteroid parent body. These organic molecules are easily contaminated by molecules at the Earth's surface; however, on the advice of meteorite scientists, the pristine samples were collected by a local resident in January 2000 without contact from his hands and were kept frozen, thus providing the most pristine sample of a carbonaceous chondrite ever collected. Enabled by a purchase from the finder in January of 2006 (at a total cost of $843,000), the meteorites now reside at the University of Alberta and the Royal Ontario Museum in in secure, frozen storage. The research tools and infrastructure funded by NSERC include a glove box housed within a walk-in freezer, and forms the core of the world's first subzero facility for processing pristine planetary samples. The glove box will provide a non-reactive, purified argon gas atmosphere in which samples of the Tagish Lake meteorite will be processed (documented, characterized, cut and subsampled) while maintaining cold, clean conditions. The equipment, which is at the cutting edge of curation of planetary samples, will be used to preserve the meteorites under the best possible conditions in perpetuity, to enable world-class research by scientists in Canada and elsewhere. The facility will increase Canadian capability for studying samples returned from future missions to the Moon, Mars, asteroids and comets.