Not many people get the chance to go to Antarctica.
Barbara Cohen, research assistant professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences, waited seven years to spend six weeks looking for meteorites in Antarctica.
"I really wanted to go," she said. "It's hard to get to Antarctica."
Since 1976, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program has been sending teams to Antarctica to look for meteorites. The program has collected 10,000 meteorites.
Meteorites are pieces of other planets that fall to Earth.
Cohen's team found two important meteorites in Antarctica. One was a lunar meteorite, and one was a martian meteorite.
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She said a total of 30 martian meteorites are known in the world, so it is rare to find one.
There are about 24 lunar meteorites in the world.
"It doesn't sound interesting, but to meteorite people, it's pretty exciting," she said.
When Apollo went to the moon in the '60s, she said it collected a bunch of lunar rocks, but they are samples from one area. The team's samples are from other areas.
Antarctica is a good place to find meteorites, because a plain white background makes them easier to see.
Meteorites get compacted in glaciers over thousands of year. When they melt, the meteorites rise to the surface.
Cohen said they were in a completely remote area looking at meteorites no one had ever viewed.
"We were literally on ground no human has ever been on before," Cohen said.
There were two teams of people from around the world in Antarctica. She was on an eight-person team at La Paz Icefield. The other team, made of four members, looked for other sites to find meteorites.
Cohen left in November 2003. Her team found the meteorites in February.
She said they don't get any special treatment for finding the meteorites.
Once they are found, she said it takes two months to get the pieces to the United States. They go to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to be looked at and named. After that, she will have to request them if she wants to study them.
She said it was magical to be on an isolated continent.
She called it pristine and said the Antarctica Treaty keeps it that way. Any waste had to be packed out, and they were not allowed to pollute.
They lived in 9-by-9-foot tents - two people to a tent. They used Coleman stoves to heat the tent and cook food. Any food they brought had to be freezable.
She said they just left the food outside, because it was cold enough.
Besides giving her valuable experience, Cohen said finding the meteorites is a service to the community.
Also, she loves the job.
"I'll never get another chance to do it," she said.
