Od Baszkówki do Kuźnicy – 27 lat badań mössbauerowskich meteorytów w Polsce

The history, how the Mössbauer studies of meteorites began in Poland, was already described in our “Meteorites Odyssey… 20 years have passed”. One late afternoon (it was probably Spring 1995) I [Jolanta Gałązka-Friedman] was sitting in the Nonna Bakun’s office (at Banacha street) and we were talking about planet Mars. Suddenly Mr. Marian Stępniewski jumped to our room saying: We have a new Polish meteorite. It is called Baszkówka. Do you have any suggestion, how could we study this meteorite? Mössbauer spectroscopy – we both answered at the same time. And this is how it started, and it has been continued for the next quarter of a century. The first results of the Mössbauer studies of the Baszkówka meteorite were presented at the ISIAME conference in Johannesburg in 1996. In this paper we present the most important problems related to meteorites, which were investigated by us using Mössbauer spectroscopy. We will, however, show almost no formulas. We will try to explain everything by a method based on plots of Mössbauer spectra. We will try not to boast too much regarding our successes, but to explain also the problems that we were not able to resolve. While investigating the Baszkówka meteorite, we got most fascinated by troilite. We noticed that most of the laboratories determined the Mössbauer parameters of troilite incorrectly. They did not take into account the so-called theta angle, the value of which depends strongly on the number of vacancies and various additives. We thought that the theta angle may show us the parent body of the investigated meteorite. Unfortunately, this hypothesis turned up to be too difficult to defend. Then we studied Morasko meteorite and we discovered, by the comparison with Baszkówka meteorite Mössbauer spectra, and determined – up to now – not identified mineral phases present also in Morasko, such as pyrrhotite, daubréelite, taenite, tetrataenite, antitaenite and cohenite. In 2019 we published in MAPS a paper titled “Application of Mössbauer spectroscopy, multidimensional discriminant analysis and Mahalanobis distance for classification of equilibrated ordinary chondrites” (4M method), in which a new objective method for classification of ordinary chondrites is based on the knowledge of the Mössbauer spectra of the 4 main mineral phases present in the ordinary chondrites of H, L and LL type. Now we are working on the refinement of the 4M method enlarging our collaborative team by various foreign laboratories.