The Monnig Meteorite Collection is one of the largest-university based collections in the world, providing amazing research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.
If you are interested in the graduate research opportunities available at TCU through the Monnig Meteorite Collection, please contact the Curator, Dr. Rhiannon Mayne.
Dr. Rhiannon Mayne – Curator
Dr. Mayne’s research is focused on understand differentiation (melting to form a core, mantle, crust structure in a planetary body), which is an extremely important process in both planetary and asteroidal formation in the early history of our Solar System. The Earth is an active planet and much of the evidence of its early history, including differen
tiation, has been erased by later processes. We cannot understand the formation of our planet and its evolution through time if we are unable to reconstruct its earliest days. Planetary geologists, like Dr. Mayne, solve this problem by studying meteorites. The vast majority of meteorites come from the main asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. Unlike the Earth and the other rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars), the asteroids, and the meteorites that derive from them, have not undergone significant reprocessing since their formation and they record the conditions and processes that were taking place in the early Solar System history.
Dr. Mayne primarily studies the mineral makeup (mineralogy) and geochemistry of asteroidal meteorites, but also incorporates both laboratory-collected spectra, and ground-based telescope data into her research. These datasets allow her to take a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the question of how differentiation progressed in the early Solar System.
Jasper Tyner – M.S. Graduate Student
Jasper Tyner is a second-year M.S. geology student at Texas Christian University and an assistant at the Monnig Meteorite Gallery. He helps with various collection and museum tasks, as well as outreach events in the community. He earned his B.S. in geology from Eastern Illinois University. Along the way he did field work in Kamchatka, Russia, and interned in mineral exploration with Antofagasta Minerals in Santiago, Chile. At TCU he works with Dr. Rhiannon Mayne on shock metamorphism in Jikharra 001, a heavily shocked meteorite from asteroid 4 Vesta. By mapping how shock features change across a single sample, he is working toward better ways to characterize and classify shock in eucrites. That, in turn, helps reconstruct the impact history of Vesta and the inner Solar System.
