Astromaterials News
Francis McCubbin, Astromaterials Curator
Volume 1 No. 1 • March 2019
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Astromaterials Newsletter! The Astromaterials Newsletter
is a bi-annual publication produced by the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at
NASA Johnson Space Center to inform the sample science community about updates to our policies,
collections, and available samples. In particular, the Astromaterials Newsletter will be our new
and exclusive mechanism for announcing new samples or new sample opportunities available to the
community across all of our collections.
Beginning in the fall of 2019, the Astromaterials Newsletter will be published on the same cadence
as the Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter. The establishment of the Astromaterials Newsletter has enabled
several important policy changes to sample announcements, sample requests, and sample allocation as
outlined below:
1. The Astromaterials Newsletter will be the only mechanism by which new samples or targets
of opportunity are announced and made available to the scientific community for PI-led research.
New samples or new targets of opportunity must appear in the Newsletter before they are listed
on JSC websites, announced at meetings, or discussed with individual members of the scientific
community. This policy change is designed to establish a fair process by which everyone in the
community has an equal opportunity to know what we have available in our collections for study.
2. There will be an 8-week "cooling off" period for samples announced in the Astromaterials
Newsletter from collections that have rolling request deadlines (i.e., Stardust, Hayabusa,
Cosmic Dust, Genesis, and Microparticle Impacts) or specially designated samples that are
of high importance and limited mass. Requests for these materials shall not be made within
the first 8-weeks of being announced to allow sufficient time for the scientific community
to self-organize into consortia to study these samples. This practice is designed to favor
the scientific quality of a consortium rather than the speed with which it forms.
3. Although the cadence of the Astromaterials Newsletter will be on a bi-annual basis,
exceptions to this schedule will be allowed for time-sensitive opportunities through off-schedule
publication of an Astromaterials Newsletter Special Issue.
In total, the primary aim of the Astromaterials Newsletter is to maximize the science returns from
our exiting collections through better communication and advertisement of sample availability to the
scientific community. Additionally, we want to establish a fair and transparent process by which the
community receives information about available samples across all of our collections. This has been
exemplified by the Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, so we have adopted this same structure for the
Astromaterials Newsletter. Our initial distribution will consist of all current and former sample
PI's for which we have updated email addresses, but we also invite any interested sample scientists
to subscribe to the Astromaterials Newsletter.
Thank you for reading the Astromaterials News section of the Astromaterials Newsletter, and I look
forward to sharing more about our wonderful collections in subsequent issues.