CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy — Rocks, mineral debris and even dust from
space are kept in special collections, museums and laboratories all over the
world, and the Vatican Observatory took the first small step to help curators
make a giant leap in coordinating their efforts globally.
Staffed by a team of Jesuit scientists, the Vatican Observatory
held the first ever workshop on the curation and conservation of meteorites and
extraterrestrial samples — that is, specimens gathered during missions in
space, such as the Apollo moon rocks or stardust captured from a comet's tail.
The event, hosted Sept. 10-13 at the observatory headquarters in
the gardens of the papal summer residence, brought together 30 curators and
collections' managers representing 27 different institutions from all over the
world. The gathering also had the support of the Meteoritical Society.
"For many years, each meteorite collection was curated more
or less independently, with the individual curators working out their own
practices for the care and preservation of the specimens, mostly under policies
of their particular institutions that were very different from that of other
institutions," Jesuit Brother Robert Macke, curator of the Vatican
Meteorite Collection, told Catholic News Service.
But about "a decade or so ago, curators who knew each other
started talking and realized that they could accomplish so much more if they
shared ideas about what they had learned," he said in an email response to
questions Sept. 13.
"We decided to hold a workshop," he said, "in the
hopes that we could have the time to hold deep and meaningful discussions
focused on curation."
Talks included outlining inventories, sharing the challenges of
being a curator of such precious collections, best practices in conservation
and for sharing samples and data. They also discussed ethical and legal issues
associated with gathering, exporting and importing meteorites from other
countries.
Like the art or antiquities trades, curators also sometimes work
with dealers and so-called meteorite hunters, and therefore, have to navigate
tracking or authenticating the origin of specimens.
"Some dealers are very ethical, but some will disregard
ethics or laws if it will get them valuable specimens. The ethical guidelines
that meteorite dealers are expected to abide by are spelled out by the
International Meteorite Collectors Association, and rules they must abide by in
order to have their meteorites officially named and recognized are specified by
the Meteoritical Society," Brother Macke wrote.
Meteorites and extraterrestrial samples, he said, "provide a
lot of useful information about the formation and history of the solar system,
planets, comets and asteroids that would be unobtainable otherwise."
As these alien specimens are exposed to earth's
"corrosive" environment, he said, "if these specimens are not
properly cared for, they can quickly degrade and become less useful for
study."
"That is where the good curation becomes crucial, to
preserve these specimens and make them available for study" now and in the
future.
The Vatican's collection includes a sample from Mars — from the
famous Nakhla meteorite that fell in Egypt in 1911. That and the core of the
observatory's collection came from a French nobleman who had one of the largest
private collections of meteorites in the world in the early 1900s.
The observatory traces its origins back to the observational
tower erected at the Vatican by Pope Gregory XIII in 1578 in preparation for
reforming the Western calendar. Pope Leo XIII formally established the Vatican
Observatory in 1891 as a visible sign of the church's centuries-old support for
science. The papal observatory moved to the papal summer residence in Castel
Gandolfo in 1935.
The observatory staff set up a second research center in Tucson,
Arizona, in 1981 after Italian skies got too bright for nighttime
observation.