January 29, 2010
No take-backs!
Meteorite enthusiasts—c’mon, what’s not to love about a meteorite?—are abuzz over the news that the “Lorton meteorite,” which smashed through the roof of a medical office outside Washington, D.C., on January 18, is the chondrite du jour in a controversy over who owns it.
Doctors Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, who rent the office space in which the meteorite landed, had planned to donate what Gallini calls “the people’s rock” to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The museum wanted to give the physicians $5,000 for their generous gesture: they would have likely earned a great deal more by selling it on the open market. So the doctors said, okay then, we’ll donate the $5,000 to Haiti earthquake relief.
Win-win? Nuh-uh, say the doctors’ landlords, who claim the law is on their side regarding ownership of space rocks that make it all the way to Earth. The Washington Post reports that “the landlords…were coming to take the stone out of the Smithsonian by sundown,” which evokes images of a stand-off in a Western B-movie.
Whoever owns the roof (and pays the repair bill) owns the rock. The landlords sound awfully bogus though. How about publishing their names so we can properly revile them.
Comment by William Marquis — January 30, 2010 @ 12:31 pm
The landlords have the right to donate it where they choose. They have the law on their side and also paid for the roof repair. So, why wouldn’t they have the right to say that the Smithsonian, who already has an inventory of 17,000 meteorites (according to their own website), may not be their first choice? If you want to make an informed decision as to who is correct, see the attached link.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2002M%26PSB..37….5S/0000005.000.html
Comment by just me — January 30, 2010 @ 3:03 pm