Hunting Meteorites with Geoff Notkin

Are you ready to meet The Meteorite Man?

On this atypical episode of The LIUniverse, rather than our usual working scientist, academic or researcher guests, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome famous meteor hunter Geoff Notkin. And he brought show and tell!

“It is a strange truth… in our world of space rocks, that meteorites, more often than not, especially the rare or super desirable ones, are in the most inconvenient places.” (Although you will hear about this one time, in 1998, when the famous meteorite hunter Skip Wilson, who found over 100 meteorites in his career, virtually had one land in his back yard in New Mexico.)

Geoff can turn the journey of a meteorite from the Moon or Mars to Earth into an action-adventure story. And when it comes to the discussion of presolar grains and chondrites, well… 

Find out how Geoff turned his passion into his career, living a life of adventure and discovery, donating many of those otherworldly treasures to academic institutions, libraries and museums. He and longtime meteor hunting partner Steve Arnold were the co-hosts of Meteorite Men, which appeared on The Science Channel.

Geoff also shares his ethical and moral issues around starting and running Aerolite Meteorites, now one of the worldwide commercial leaders in the field of meteoritics. Chuck and Geoff discuss whether it’s even possible for amateurs, academics and business to co-exist in fields from paleontology to archeology, to meteoritics. 

As always, we relish the day’s joyful, cosmically cool thing, and it’s a strange one: preserved cockroaches that ate moon dust are being sold at an auction. How did those roaches ingest that moon dust? You’ll have to watch to find out.*

How can we top that? Perhaps with a story about Geoff himself eating moon dust and living to tell the tale – which he does on this episode of The LIUniverse.

If you’d like to know more about Geoff, check out his YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAcGREEGQbQV3x-CnOXcXTg 

We hope you enjoy this episode, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon. 

*Since the recording of this episode, NASA has halted the auction of the cockroaches, exerting their ownership rights over the aforementioned moon dust.

Credits for Images or Clips Used in this Episode:

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampling asteroid Bennu video clip –NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona, Public Domain

Planetary accretion (artist’s impression) – ESO/L. Calçada, CC BY 4.0

A piece of the Allende Meteorite – Shiny Things, CC BY 2.0

Electron microscope image of a presolar grain – Kathryn Hynes, CC BY 2.0