ANSMET
The Antarctic Search for Meteorites, a long-running United States programme that sends field teams to collect meteorites from the Antarctic ice.
ANSMET, short for the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, has sent field parties to Antarctica almost every southern summer since the 1976–77 season. It followed Japanese expeditions that had shown meteorites concentrate on the continent's blue-ice fields. The programme is funded by the US National Science Foundation and run from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Small teams camp for weeks on the ice, travel in lines on snowmobiles, and pick up every dark stone they see, recording each one's position.
Finds are kept frozen and shipped to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they are thawed in clean, dry nitrogen cabinets, described and made available to researchers worldwide, with the Smithsonian Institution helping to classify them. ANSMET has returned more than 20,000 meteorites, a collection that is valuable because the specimens are collected and handled under controlled conditions.
Its most famous finds come from the Allan Hills: ALH 84001, the martian meteorite at the centre of the 1996 debate about possible fossil life, and ALH A81005, the first meteorite recognised as coming from the Moon. You can spot an Antarctic sample by its name, which combines a location abbreviation, the season and a number.
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