This project was designed to introduce a group of undergraduate students to the tools and techniques
used to classify equilibrated ordinary chondrites. Each member of the group chose their own meteorite
for analysis. Students worked in small groups with faculty and graduate student mentors to learn how to
operate a petrographic microscope. Students worked with mentors to obtain images with this
microscope, to build image mosaics, and to assess the degree of weathering and shock effects in their
meteorites. Students sat in with a faculty mentor to acquire electron images and mineral-chemical data
on their samples using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). These data were obtained to provide
additional information on the meteorite’s group and type. Based on the data obtained, three of the four
meteorites are typical ordinary chondrites (two H5 and on L5 chondrites), but one of the more heavily
weathered samples provided a surprise; it is an enstatite chondrite. Enstatite chondrites are fairly rare,
comprising only about 1% of all known meteorites. Students will be identified as co-classifiers of these
new meteorites in the Meteoritical Bulletin Database (https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/), the main
classification database used by researchers worldwide.