14 DAY TRIAL // Participants in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program have just concluded their latest expedition to Antarctica, searching for space rock samples that are preserved there. They return home with no less than 300 meteorite samples, making this one of the most successful missions of this sort to date.
Going meteorite hunting is one of the few remaining options for recovering materials that once belonged to other worlds. There are currently no sample-return missions in flight, and won't be either, at least for the foreseeable future.
This year's ANSMET expedition retrieved fewer meteorites that the team leaders would have predicted, mostly because early snowfalls obscured most of the samples early on in the research. Regardless, the team was able to find samples nearly everywhere they looked.
Throughout ANSMET's rich history, which began in 1976, more than 20,000 meteorite samples have been collected from Antarctica. The project is funded by the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Space reports.