This award provides support for the 58th annual meeting of the Metoritical Society which will be held in Washington, DC in September, 1995. Additional support is provided by NASA, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, The Barringer Foundation, JEOL USA Inc., and the Smithsonian Institution. Funding from the National Science Foundation will be used for travel grants for students and for scientists from the former Soviet Bloc countries. This meeting is a valuable forum for presentation of new scientific results, exchange of scientific ideas, and stimulation of potential collaborative work. Meteoritical Society meetings are technical conferences with wide international participation. Meeting venues generally alternate between Europe and the United States, reflecting the sub-equal membership in the Society from the two continents. These meetings typically draw scientists from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States. As many as 400 participants are expected at the Washington meeting. Technical sessions are 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 interest have included the nature and origin of interstellar grains found in chondrite meteorites, the distribution of short-lived radio-nuclides and their role in early planetary melting, the nature of volatiles in Martian SNC meteorites and their implications for the volatile budget on Mars, the origin of isotopically-anomalous material in the early solar system, and the possible secular variations in the meteorite population bombarding Earth over the past several tens of thousands of years. A special session at the 1995 meet ing will be devoted to the formation and evolution of the asteroid belt and the relation between the meteorite population and the asteroid population. A plenary session is planned to address the state of planetary sciences in general together with an overview of science learned from meteorites collected through the highly successful Antarctic Search for Meteorites program. A public lecture at the National Air and Space Museum addressing a topic of popular interest is also planned for one evening.
