The NASA ExMAG meeting (Extraterrestrial Materials Assessment Group) for Spring, 2024 is going on now. Day 1 status (mostly preliminaries):
1. General statuses. Updates on Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity air test (RIP- not news). Updates on FY24 budget (since March bills signed): up in general (Space Science), but flat or down (real dollars) in various line items. Updates (such as they are) on programs like New Frontiers/Discovery/etc.: nothing dramatic to report there. Mars is languishing: nothing cancelled but nothing in the pipeline either (in terms of actual hardware- not talk).
2. Informatics, human resources/workforce development, and info-infrastructure, including posters on lab infrastructure.
3. Meteoritics: updates/field reports on the German bolide (formerly 2024 BX1). The meteorites found were not “Nennhausen,” but “Ribbeck”- winds blew the fragments to the next town. Ribbeck is sizeable (few hundred grams), and a rare aubrite. We have an update on opening the Chilean desert as a better DCA (dense collecting area, or meteorite paydirt). We have an update on the US search for Antarctic Meteorites this season- ANSMET 2023-‘24; good stuff, though far too early for data on individual specimens.
More tomorrow- Ryugu/Bennu talks!