The UCLA Cosmochemistry DatabaseOPEN ACCESS
Bidong Zhang, Kerstin A. Lehnert, Alan E. Rubin, Kevin D. McKeegan, Paul H. Warren, Jennifer L. Mays, Lucia R. Profeta, Annika K. Johansson, Peng Ni, Edward D. Young, Frank T. Kyte, Ming-Chang Liu, Emilie T. Dunham, Haolan Tang, Peng Ji & Juan D. Figueroa-Salazar
Scientific Data, Volume 10, Article number: 874
Published: 07 December 2023
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“The current collections of extraterrestrial materials include meteorites and mission-returned samples from the Moon, asteroids (e.g., Ryugu by Hayabusa 2), a cometary coma (Stardust), and the solar wind (Genesis). The chemical and isotopic compositions of extraterrestrial materials are essential aspects of our knowledge of the Solar System. The UCLA meteorite team has analyzed the elemental compositions of a wide range of extraterrestrial materials including stony, stony-iron and iron meteorites, and lunar samples since the 1960s, and has accumulated a large quantity of data.
These UCLA data have mostly been published in journal articles, but most of the published data were neither digitized nor stored in a single repository that would allow easy access and discovery by the meteoritical community. The UCLA Cosmochemistry Database is part of our endeavor to compile all the cosmochemical data collected by the UCLA meteorite team. The UCLA Cosmochemistry Database aims to provide a freely accessible, web-based platform that allows the meteoritical community and general public to browse and use these data. We also envisage the UCLA Cosmochemistry Database as an example of rescuing historical, undigitized geochemical data. The UCLA team works with the Astromaterials Data System (Astromat, https://www.astromat.org/) to build and operate the UCLA Cosmochemistry Database, and it is one of the data collections stored in Astromat. Both the UCLA and Astromat teams provide continuous input, maintenance, and improvement to the collection.
The UCLA Cosmochemistry Database so far includes downloadable datasheets (Microsoft® Excel® files). Fifty-four publications 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,
26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,
52,53,54 by the UCLA meteorite team have been digitized as datasheets, which are stored in the Astromat repository (AstroRepo). Tabular data from spreadsheets and metadata of files are incorporated into a relational database (AstroDB Synthesis), that can be searched and accessed via an interactive web interface and APIs. The compositional data were collected by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), radiochemical neutron activation analysis (RNAA), and atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS).”
