Lincoln LaPaz
The director of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico, who tracked fireballs from eyewitness reports and recovered the giant Norton County stone.
Key facts
- Born
- 1897
- Died
- 1985
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Astronomer and mathematician
Lincoln LaPaz was a mathematician who became fascinated by meteorites. In 1944 he founded the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, one of the first research centres anywhere devoted to the subject, and ran it for many years.
LaPaz became expert at working out where meteorites had landed from the reports of people who had seen a fireball. By gathering the times, directions and sounds that witnesses described, he could narrow down the path of the fireball and send searchers to the likely fall zone.
His most famous success came after a fireball on 18 February 1948 over Kansas and Nebraska. Using hundreds of eyewitness accounts, LaPaz and his colleagues found many stones near the border of the two states. The largest, dug out of a field near Norton, Kansas, weighed about a tonne. Norton County is an aubrite, a pale meteorite made almost entirely of the mineral enstatite, and it remains the largest aubrite known.
LaPaz also studied unusual lights in the sky in the American South-West in the late 1940s, and worked on the hazards meteoroids might pose to spacecraft. The collection he built is now a major part of the meteorite museum at the University of New Mexico.
On the timeline
- 18 February 1948Norton County: the largest aubrite