A Photo Gallery of MeteorWrongs
 Dr. Randy Korotev boasts an impressive resume. When Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the Moon bearing lunar samples, Dr. Korotev was one of the lucky group to examine the space souvenirs. In 1988, he joined a team that collected hundreds of meteorites from Antarctica. He has written and contributed to papers on meteorites (among many other things) and has served on teams with names like "Meteorite Working Group."
Since 1979, this lunar geochemist has taught in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis. It is there that he curates A Photo Gallery of MeteorWrongs, a web site that shows off the unbelievable number of rocks, chunks of organic matter, and other blobs mistaken for meteorites and sent in to the professionals for study. We love this site and featured it in Yahoo! Picks in 2005. Now, we catch up with Dr. Korotev to see how the Web has changed his opinion of humanity and how—just maybe—one lunar geochemist has changed humanity's opinions on what it finds in its backyards. Has the photo gallery helped to diminish the number of "meotorwrongs," or photos of "meteorwrongs," shipped your way? No! Has it increased the number of queries you get each month? Yes! I get the impression that few people look through the info I provide. They just want a quick answer and don't want to read anything. We're floored by the amount of detail you lavish on each rock, describing why the chunk probably isn't a meteorite and what is probably is. Does the site take up a lot of time? I work on it every few months, when I get some good photos. I want people to understand the CONCEPTS. Some get it, some don't. I still get people who say, "I looked through all your meteorwrong photos and my rock doesn't look like any of them." Yet, their rock doesn't have a fusion crust and it's full of vesicles. They don't get the concepts. The Photo Gallery's writing has a wonderful bite. Did you intend to make the site humorous—or did you just get driven to it by the sheer number of faux-meteorites trucked in to your office? I like funny, and I hope people do laugh. Some of that stuff really offends some people, though. Did you find the sub-site of quotations? There's only one link to them, so not many people find them. Read the "Tell Us What You Really Think" page. What do you say to someone who writes, "Doesn't seem radioactive because it doesn't affect a transistor radio"? Ah, the Web. It brings out everyone's innermost thoughts. Anything else that's surprised you about the Photo Gallery? (1) I get messages from people from many different countries. A guy in Iran sent me some rocks. Can you imagine how hard that was? I think the package was opened 3 times before it got to me. (2) The interest "regular" people have in meteorites. Also, the level of eternal optimism people have. They just don't understand how low the probability is that they've found a meteorite. (3) The fact that so many people are good at recognizing rocks that "don't look like the other rocks around here." We may not know rocks, but we know wonderful sites. Thanks, Dr. Korotev!
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