I no longer have that bulky, ugly LED calculator with the glowing red numerals that I could spell SHELLOIL with by typing the numerals “71077345” and turning the calculator upside down (I miss L.E.D. calculators and not for just this!) A few ‘elite’ students in my class were the first to have a calculator and they were so ‘new’ that even though the removed the drudgery of doing math ‘the long way’ our teachers allowed their use. These same few students also had a ‘meteorite kit’ for show & bragging purposes. I saved my allowance for weeks and yes, I too joined that airy group that had a calculator and a Meteorite Kit. I no longer have my LED calculators (I had several over the years) as they became obsolete technology over the passing years but…

I Still Have My Meteorite Kit

Image by author

These meteorite sampler kits were available at scientific stores like “The Nature Company.” They were great stocking-stuffers at Christmastime. A little inexpensive opaque plastic cassette box with a printed piece of white card stock explaining each of the five meteorite items and the second printed card was the actual display mount with a small fingernail-sized fragment of each offer glued in place next to its explanatory text.

From the printed card is the following:

About 3000 tons of material from outer space falls to Earth daily. Most of it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere as a meteor or shooting star. A piece which reaches the earths surface is called a meteorite. If a meteorite is large enough, its impact produces a crater. This meteorite oxide crust comes from just outside Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona. It was formed by the weathering of a nickel-iron meteorite which fell about 30,000 years ago.

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A very large meteorite melts the rock in its crater at impact. If some of this melt is thrown from the crater into space it hardens into a glass called a tektite and then falls back to earth. This tektite from Thailand formed about 730,000 years ago.

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One of the largest probable impact structures is the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada, formed about 1.8 billion years ago. Micropegmatites formed by the slow cooling of the impact melt within the crater. The fallback breccia is formed of broken rock which was thrown out and fell back into the crater. The pyrrhotite from Sudbury contains nickel thought to have come from the meteorite.

The material “pyrrhotite” is a magnetic pyrite. Its color is similar to pyrite and a magnet is weakly attracted to it. As the iron content is decreased the magnetism attraction is increased. The non-magnetic material is called troilite, which is a mineral also native to Earth but found to be more abundant in meteorites and specifically those originating from the Moon and the planet Mars. The material troilite has been discovered on the Moon and is deemed possible to also be present on Mars as well. Confirmation for these findings were allegedly given by the instruments aboard the space probes of the lunar Apollo series, the Mars Viking landers and of the (former USSR/European) Phobos Space Probe to their respective targets.

Interplanetary Space Probe Phobos?

Most people have never heard of the Interplanetary Space Probe Phobos, which was a series of two probes launched days apart in the summer of 1988. The former Soviet Union even issued a commemorative postage stamp depicting a key element of the intended international Phobos probe’s mission (here, depositing one of two ‘rovers’ on the Martian moon.)

(image by author) See: Collecting Soviet Era Postage Stamps by author

The Soviet Union in conjunction with several European countries launched the two probes, Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 in July of 1988. The Phobos 1 failed while still in Earth orbit due to faulty software uploaded from a  ground-based station which caused the probe to turn its antenna away from the tracking station. The vessel was subsequently lost in near orbit.

The sister vessel Phobos 2 departed as planned and studied both the Sun and the finally Red Planet but it too tragically failed just as it was nearing the inner Martian moon Phobos, the focal point of its mission.

The very last frame image it returned was purported to show a mysterious long shadow on the small moon Phobos that could not have been of the approaching probe. As neither probe actually completed their main objectives neither were deemed by its planners and makers to have been a success. Much blame had been laid for the failings.

Many conspiracy groups believe that the Phobos 2 was destroyed by a UFO and the image of the shadow on Phobos and an infrared image of the so-called ‘mystery object‘ were proof of alien intervention. Furthermore, the subsequent failure of the $400,000,000 U.S. Observer Space Probe mission cemented the fringe beliefs contention of alien involvement near the planet Mars.

It is a curious factoid that Phobos’ orbital speed is slowly increasing and not decreasing despite its near proximity to the planet’s surface. This would most likely be possible for a naturally occurring moon only if the moon were hollow inside. A hollow moon does prove aliens were involved, but the lack of proof is not proof of absence either. Some interesting and strange things to ponder, eh?

Apparently we humans are a virus and it appears that we intend to send other viruses to Mars later this autumn as ‘an experiment.’ Maybe those aliens have a right to fear us after all…