NASA Astromaterials: ANSMET Report April 2025

ANSMET is excited at the possibility of a field season coming in December of 2025! We do not have the full go ahead from NSF yet, but we are holding out hope that we will have a spot among the science teams that deploy to the ice this coming season.

Our plans, if we do indeed return to the ice, are to start systematic searches at the Dominion Range (DOM) Main icefield. This icefield is at the foot of the Dominion Range mountains and features about 95 km2 of bare blue ice!

For comparison, the icefields around ANSMET’s most recent field site, Davis Nunataks and Mt. Ward, totaled ~65 km2 of blue ice, and ANSMET recovered over ~3400 meteorites from that area over eight seasons of searching. ANSMET has done some reconnaissance searching at DOM Main in 1985 and 2003 and recovered 55 meteorites.

At the end of our last field season, (January 2024) we scoped out a good airplane runway site in the area and cached fuel, field gear and the snow groomer (to groom the runway) there in anticipation of our next search campaign.

Thus, DOM Main is well set up as ANSMET’s next field site- and our recon work and the amount of blue ice there are good indicators it may hold a significant concentration of meteorites. Hopefully with systematic searching we can recover lots of those meteorites!

Flying into DOM Main. Note the large brown area full of terrestrial rocks (moraine) on the right and the blue ice (but under a thin snow cover) to the left. (Photo: ANSMET/Lauren Edgar)

The Dominion Range Main icefield.

— Jim Karner, University of Utah, Ralph Harvey, Case Western

Astrobiology, Astrogeology, Astrochemistry,