Support of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society to be held in Chicago in 2000.

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This award, supported by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds to help support the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society. The meeting will be held in Chicago, from August 28-September 1, 2000, under the organizational sponsorship of the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. Additional support is anticipated from NASA, The Barringer Foundation, JEOL USA Inc., Cameca Inc., Finnigan Inc., and Micromass Inc. The principal scientific focus of the meeting is on meteorites as clues to the origin and evolution of the solar system. Funding from the National Science Foundation is intended for stipends to enable students as well as some established scientists (primarily from former Soviet Bloc countries who cannot otherwise afford to attend) to participate in the Meeting.Annual meetings of the Meteoritical Society are technical conferences, not conventions, and they attract broad international participation. The subject matter of the conference is dominated by mineralogical, isotopic and chemical studies of meteorites, theoretical studies of early solar system processes, and field and theoretical studies of impact phenomena. The overall scientific theme is learning about the formation and evolution of our solar system and its components, and solar systems in general. Recent topics of great interest at Meteoritical Society meetings have included the nature and origin of interstellar grains that have been found preserved in chondrite meteorites; the distribution of short-lived radionuclides in the newly-formed solar system and their possible role in early planetary melting; geochemical and isotopic characteristics of Martian (SNC) meteorites and their implications for the geology, atmosphere, hydrosphere and possibly biosphere on Mars; the possible astrophysical sites (stellar types) from which isotopically-anomalous material known to be present in the early solar system was derived; and possible secular variations in the meteorite population bombarding Earth over the past several tens of thousands of years.