Roberta Score
The NASA laboratory manager who picked up ALH 84001 on the Antarctic ice in December 1984, the most famous Martian meteorite of all.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Meteorite curator
Roberta Score managed the Antarctic Meteorite Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where meteorites collected by ANSMET are opened, described and shared with scientists. In the 1984 to 1985 season she joined the search teams on the ice herself.
On 27 December 1984, riding a snowmobile across the Far Western Icefield of the Allan Hills, she spotted a stone that looked greenish against the ice. It weighed about 1.9 kilograms. It was the first meteorite to be catalogued from that season, so it was given the name ALH 84001.
At first it was classified as a diogenite, a rock from the asteroid Vesta, because it is made mostly of the mineral orthopyroxene. Nearly ten years later, in 1993, the scientist David Mittlefehldt found that its chemistry and oxygen isotopes matched the Martian meteorites. It turned out to be one of the oldest known rocks from Mars, about 4.1 billion years old.
In 1996 a team led by David McKay announced that ALH 84001 might contain traces of ancient Martian microbes. Most scientists now think non-living processes explain what they saw, but the debate made it world famous. Score's sharp eye on the ice is a reminder of how much depends on the person who first notices an unusual stone.
On the timeline
- 27 December 1984ALH 84001 is found