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Randy
L. Korotev
Dr.
Randy Korotev is a lunar geochemist. He has studied lunar samples and their
chemical compositions since 1969 when the Apollo 11 astronauts collected the
first lunar samples on the Moon and brought them to Earth (Haskin et al.,
1970). He received both his B.S. (1971) and Ph.D. (1976) degrees in chemistry
from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Since 1979 he has been at
Washington University in Saint Louis, where he is a research professor. He
runs a laboratory for INAA (instrumental neutron activation analysis), a
technique that can determine the concentrations of 30 or more chemical
elements in small samples without destroying the samples. He has analyzed more
than 5800 Apollo lunar samples and exactly 78 Russian Luna samples by INAA.
He studied the first lunar meteorite to be recognized, ALHA 81005 (Korotev et
al., 1983), and has studied most of the subsequently found lunar meteorites.
He's analyzed more than 2000 lunar meteorite samples by INAA and thinks that
he has seen more lunar meteorites than anyone else. He was a member of the
1988-89 ANSMET team, which collected more than 870 meteorites from the Lewis
Cliff and MacAlpine Hills areas of Antarctica, including lunar meteorite MAC88104/5
and martian meteorite LEW
88516. He has served on the Curation and Planning Team for
Extraterrestrial Materials (CAPTEM, a NASA advisory group), the Meteorite
Working Group (MWG, an NASA advisory group), and was an associate editor of
the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science for 15 years. He is a member
and fellow of The Meteoritical Society. He’s authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers about the Moon, lunar
meteorites, earthworms, aluminum foil, coal flyash, birds, and some other
things.
Before
becoming a scientist Dr. Korotev worked as a paper boy, furniture deliverer
and installer, dish washer, playground instructor, factory worker, and as a
scrap-metal torch man. He regards himself as a pretty good photographer and
cook. In his spare time he’s an avid birder who
likes to do Breeding Bird Surveys and Christmas Bird Counts. You can read
more about him here.
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Disclaimer
Dr.
Korotev’s main interest in meteorites is with that small fraction (less
than 1 in 1000) of meteorites that is from the Moon. Dr. Korotev is not a
geologist, which means he doesn’t know as much as he should about
terrestrial rocks. He is also not really a
meteoriticist, which means that he also doesn’t know as much about
‘regular’ meteorites (the other >99.9%) as he might. However, he does
know some real geologists and meteoriticists and he does ask them questions
when he is stumped, which happens a lot. Dr. Korotev has personally found
many meteorites in Antarctica but he has never found one anywhere else. He
has seen lots of meteorites, but he hasn’t seen them all. On a cold evening
in 1989 when his ANSMET team mates showed him the two stones of the MAC
88104/5 lunar meteorite in the field and asked “What do you think about
this one?,” he not only did not instantly
recognize them as Moon rocks, he said that they weren’t meteorites at all.
He likes to think he’s wiser now.
Dr.
Korotev receives a lot of telephone calls and e-mail about meteorites and
is often slow to respond to those messages. He often does not respond at
all to people who send him out-of-focus photos of rocks and who ask “Is
this a meteorite?” If he does respond, he’ll say, “I don't know. I cannot
identify a meteorite from a photo.” He gets annoyed at persons who do not
make the effort to write their questions in full sentences or who ask dumb
questions like “What do you think about this rock?” (Answer: He doesn't
think about it at all.) He feels no obligation to respond to people who do
not have the courtesy to give their full name, place of residence, and
where they found the rock. He hates to talk on the telephone and really doesn’t want to receive phone calls from people
who think they have a meteorite. He can't hear very well, he can't recite
URL's of web pages over the phone, and he can't identify meteorites over
the phone. His cell phone confuses him and he doesn’t send or read text
messages. He doesn’t have a page on Facebook. He doesn’t Twitter. He doesn’t
spell very well, and appreciates it when people point out spelling,
grammatical, and factual errors on these web sites. Other than that, he's a
lot of fun.
He
hopes that everybody who reads these web sites will find a lunar meteorite
and send him a piece first.
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Dr. Korotev collecting a
meteorite in Antarctica
(photo by Roberta Score)
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Dr. Korotev’s home town is
Green Bay, Wisconsin. His sister gave him the Packers hat.
(photo by Scott Sandford)
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Dr. Korotev's
lunar meteorite "to-do" board, November, 2008
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Dr.
Korotev’s favorite chemical element
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A Gentoo Penguin rookery in
Antarctica
(photo by Randy Korotev)
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