Letter to the Editor and the President of the Meteoritical Society

I was a member of the Meteoritical Society in the days when the Society and its journal, Meteoritics, were dominated by a group of delightful amateurs, one of whom, for example, suggested that all ordinary chondrites had formed from the Canyon Diablo iron meteorite with the local sandstones and limestones at the impact site. I was a member when a group of “professionals” decided to take over the Society and Meteoritics. I was then rather neutral on the issue because there were plenty of journals in those days that accepted papers on meteoritics: Journal of Geophysical Research, Physics, The Astrophysical Journal, Zeitschrift fuer Naturwissenschaften, to name just a few, and the quality of papers and discussions at the meetings of the Society were generally very high anyway, even before the “takeover.” When I read the abstracts for meetings and the papers in MAPS of the past few years, I am disturbed by the consequences of the “takeover.” I see mountains of trivia and near-trivia about meteorites. For-meteorite’s-sake, will someone begin to describe in excruciating detail what the surface of a meteorite parent body contains and looks like and what one is likely to find as one descends deeper and deeper into its solid body—all based on the mountains of knowledge about meteorites of today. I do not care whether the description is for the parent body of iron meteorites, achondrites, ordinary chondrites, carbonaceous chondrites, or oddballs. Just get us something that we can put our teeth into.