"Beauty is skin deep ., but craters probe further", is free and open to the public. It will take place in the Giffels Auditorium in Old Main at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Most of us think of the major impact of an object from outer space as a harbinger of death and destruction. Usually it is.

It was the impact of an asteroid into the Earth just off the coast of Mexico 60 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs, and an impact of an extraterrestrial object into the desert of Arizona 50,000 years ago created a hole the size of central New York. But what if the impact was on an airless, unpopulated planet? Such impacts have occurred frequently on the Moon, and many other astronomical objects. While they did not bring death and destruction, they did provide a means of scraping away the weathered surface and looking into the object. They also provided a means of firing pieces of the object into space, so that some of the pieces could ultimately travel to Earth.

Modern space missions are providing new information on the impacted surfaces of astronomical objects, and they now provide an opportunity to bring samples from their surfaces to Earth.

Dr. Carle Pieters, a planetary scientist at Brown University, Rhode Island, will report the latest findings of such studies when she presents the fall 1999 Barringer Lecture at the University of Arkansas. Her lecture, "Beauty is skin deep ., but craters probe further", is free and open to the public. It will take place in the Giffels Auditorium in Old Main at 7p.m. Monday, Nov. 15.

The Barringer Lectures are sponsored by the Barringer Crater Company (owners of the Arizona meteor crater) and the University Museum, and they are hosted by the University's departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Geology and Physics.