Meteoritical Society Will Honor UMass Scientist Joseph Goldstein with Prestigious Leonard Medal

Oct. 14, 2004

AMHERST, Mass. – Joseph Goldstein, former dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will receive yet another prestigious award at the next annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society in 2005: The Leonard Medal, which honors outstanding contributions to the science of meteoritics and closely allied fields.

“I know most of the people who have won the award,” says Goldstein, a Distinguished Professor and member of the mechanical and industrial engineering department at UMass. “I'm privileged to be in such good company.”

Goldstein's meteoric career began while he was studying solid-state diffusion, or the movement of atoms through solids, at MIT in the 1960s. Using a newly discovered electron microscope, he was looking for something interesting to study. “We had a world-renowned metallurgist named Cyril Stanley Smith who was studying the microstructure of meteorites,” recalls Goldstein. “He figuratively took my hand, brought me into the meteorite collections, and triggered my lifelong passion.” Meteorite bodies reach the earth through much the same cataclysmic process that killed the dinosaurs many million years ago, when an asteroid struck the earth with devastating consequences. When bits and pieces from similar collisions on nearby planets or our moon are launched into space, they can enter earth's orbit and fall to earth as one of those feathery shooting stars that capture the imaginations of scientists, lovers, or superstitious star-gazers everywhere.

Goldstein has studied hundreds of these meteorites, collected from extremely cold locations such as Antarctica or extremely dry places such as deserts, where their extraterrestrial formation and characteristics can be preserved with minimal weathering. “This is sort of like a detective story,” says Goldstein. “You weren't there to see who done it, or in this case, what done it? But from the metals in these rocks, you can make many deductions about the formation of asteroids and planetary surfaces.”

What Goldstein typically deals with are pieces of meteorites consisting of iron and nickel, with small amounts of cobalt, phosphorous, carbon, and sulfur. He can trace the makeup and formation of these extraterrestrial visitors to similar characteristics in actual rocks gathered on the moon, and hopefully soon on Mars, comets, and asteroids. Goldstein is no stranger to awards. He has received many honors, including the Henry Clifton Sorby Award of the International Metallographic Society, and the Presidential Sciences Award of the Microbeam Analysis Society.

He even has an asteroid named after him: “Joegoldstein,” minor planet designation 4989, a five- to fifteen-kilometer-in-diameter monument to Joseph Goldstein whose display case is the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

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