Meteorite Collector Donates Specimens for Trinity Research

On the morning of February 15, 2009, a cameraman was filming runners in the Austin Marathon when a fireball streaked through the sky above them and disappeared behind the tree line. The fireball itself made news, and when Phil Mani ’80 heard about it,
he jumped into action.

Mani studied the marathon course and, using Google Street View, found the spot where the cameraman had been standing, facing northeast. Assessing the footage and the man’s location, Mani concluded that any meteorites would have fallen northeast of the capital city, in a triangular swath of land that widened as it stretched toward Oklahoma.

The next morning, Mani directed staff at his law firm to call radio stations and sheriffs’ offices in towns northeast of Austin, inquiring about reports of sonic booms or unexplained roof damage. By 10 a.m., he knew the meteorites had landed near the town of West, north of Waco: Some men working outdoors had called law enforcement to report an unseen assailant throwing rocks. Soon Mani’s meteorite-hunting colleagues had secured permission to search local farms, and Mani joined them later that week.

Since the turn of the millennium, Mani has amassed a collection of about 4,000 meteorite specimens representing roughly 1,000 different rocks. While most have come through purchases and trades, Mani has found dozens himself through searches like the one in West. “The geology fascinates me,” Mani says. So do the big questions meteorites inspire, some answerable and others less so. “How did the solar system form? How did Earth get so lucky to be in the right zone for life? Why are we here?” 

What's a meteorite?
A meteor is a chunk of space rock descending through Earth’s atmosphere. If it reaches the ground, the fragment is called a meteorite.

Now, Trinity University students can contemplate these questions with the help of Mani’s donation of 24 meteorite specimens to the university’s Department of Earth and Environmental Geosciences in June. The specimens constitute the university’s first research collection of meteorites and create academic opportunities that are relatively rare in undergraduate-focused teaching institutions.

“Meteorites are underrepresented in most university collections,” Mani says. “But since they’ve been such a major part of my life, I picked out some pieces I thought would be best preserved for educational purposes—and where better than Trinity?”

Mani has built a strong relationship with the geosciences department. In 2023, he led a lab for a planetary science course taught by Les Bleamaster III ’98, Ph.D., director of operations for Trinity’s D. R. Semmes School of Science. Mani showed students how to identify different types of meteorites and distinguish between meteorites and terrestrial lookalikes, or “meteorwrongs.” The following day, Mani gave a talk about meteorite-hunting techniques and ethics. For two years, Marrs McLean Hall showcased a roughly 200-pound iron meteorite on loan from Mani, a fragment of the massive meteor that created Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona. That rock was replaced this fall with a new loan, a stony meteorite called an ordinary chondrite.

Meteorites are valuable because they allow scientists to study material from space without sending a mission to collect samples. Roughly 99% are fragments of asteroids that formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, early in the development of the solar system. Their study yields clues about the early history of both asteroids and the planets, including Earth. The remaining 1% of meteorites are pieces of Mars or the moon.

Mani’s donation includes the three major compositional types of meteorites (irons, stony-irons, and stony meteorites). It also includes specimens discovered within days of falling to Earth as well as pieces that had sat on Earth and weathered significantly before they were found. Scientists who study meteorites often have access only to tiny slices of rock they can scrutinize under a microscope. Mani made sure his samples were robust enough for students to handle and large enough to examine with a hand lens.

Several of Mani’s specimens have both a cut face, revealing the interior of the rock, and a fusion crust: the dark, glossy exterior formed when the outer layer of rock melts as it descends through the atmosphere and then cools.

These features allow students to study the rock’s entire history, says Geosciences Professor Graham Edwards, Ph.D. “When you look in the interior, you are looking at the first few million years of our solar system, a whole 4.5 billion years ago,” he says. “Then, when you look at the surface, you’re looking at those seconds during which this rock was falling through our atmosphere to Earth.”

Edwards and his students will conduct the analysis required for three of the donated specimens to become classified, or officially known to science. They will study the rocks’ texture and the relative abundance of various minerals inside them and submit their findings to the Meteoritical Society for peer review. If approved, the specimens will be given official names and added to the Meteoritical Bulletin Database. Portions of the meteorites will be sent to an official repository such as the Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Collection at Texas Christian University (TCU).

Mani’s specimens also will allow Bleamaster to integrate meteorite samples into his courses throughout the semester. The new collection will facilitate independent study and summer research and perhaps even outreach beyond campus.

“It’s an opportunity for us to think creatively about how we can use a set like this to spark excitement and interest in planetary science, cosmochemistry, and meteoritics within and beyond Trinity,” Edwards says.

Fun Fact
The collection donated to Trinity contains meteorites that, by coincidence, all fell on February 15: Ash Creek, Texas (2009); Chelyabinsk, Russia (2013); and El Sauz, Texas (2023).

Mani’s curiosity about the geologic record began in childhood, when he spent after-school hours collecting rocks and fossils along San Antonio’s Salado Creek. He initially attended The George Washington University as a pre-medical student, but, realizing the curriculum and career weren’t for him, he transferred to Trinity because it was close to home and had a strong academic reputation. Searching for direction, he signed up for an introductory geology course taught by then-Geosciences Professor Robert Freed, Ph.D. 

An initial lab required the students to identify and describe a group of mineral samples. Mani was the first to turn in his assignment and headed for the door. “Not so fast,” Freed told him. “You’re my new lab assistant. Go help the other students.”

Mani realized that he had both a photographic memory for rocks and minerals and an aptitude for teaching. Freed’s faith in him boosted his own self-confidence, and he decided to pursue geology.

Mani went on to earn a master’s in petroleum geology from Texas A&M University, motivated after the oil embargo of the 1970s to help his country achieve energy independence, and joined a Dallas-based exploration company as a geologist. He later earned his Juris Doctor at St. Mary’s University School of Law and worked as a landman in Fort Worth, Texas, before focusing on oil and gas law for the bulk of his career.

One Sunday in 2000, Mani saw a news segment about a meteorite auction. “I didn’t even know you could own a meteorite,” he remembers. He began reading about them and formed a friendship with the late Art Ehlmann, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of geology at TCU and the volunteer curator of the institution’s Monnig Meteorite Collection. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t shut up about meteorites—for the next 20 years,” Mani says.

In 2003, Mani went on his first meteorite hunt in the Chicago suburb of Park Forest, Illinois, after seeing news reports that witnesses had spotted a fireball. Over several days, he found about 20 small fragments on city streets.

Two years later, he made an astonishing “cold find,” the discovery of a long-buried meteorite, in Brenham township, about 100 miles west of Wichita, Kansas. The hamlet is well known for the meteorites that have been found there since the 1880s, when a farmer struck them with his plow.

Mani funded the expedition and built an oversized metal detector that would work down to 10 feet below ground. The equipment helped his colleague recover the first several meteorites, some weighing 300 pounds or more, and, when Mani joined the search, they turned up a rock weighing 1,433 pounds. The size of a coffee table, it’s the largest meteorite ever found at Brenham.

When Mani parts with a meteorite, it’s for the sake of advancing science and introducing new audiences to meteoritics. He loaned the Brenham find to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for display and later sold it to the new natural history museum in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. A contact there sent him photos of schoolchildren touching and marveling at the stone. “I was just a temporary curator of that piece,” Mani says. “I’m really proud of what I did there, to be able to preserve it and send it off into the world.”

Over the past five years, Mani has donated dozens of specimens to the Monnig Meteorite Collection and Gallery. These include samples of lunar and Martian meteorites and the El Sauz meteorite that fell in South Texas in 2023, another piece of which is included in his donation to Trinity.

“Phil is phenomenally generous, and because he is a geologist, I think that draws him to consider what samples he donates in terms of their educational value,” says Rhiannon Mayne, Ph.D., the Monnig’s curator. “He’s trying to create opportunities.”

Mani’s collecting, and his generosity, have opened doors for him as well.

This past May, Mani was invited to visit the Vatican’s 1,200-piece meteorite collection, to which he plans one day to contribute. He previously was invited to visit the Johnson Space Center’s lunar sample laboratory, which is not open to the public. And he has met Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the geologist who walked on the moon in 1972.

“This geological journey into meteorites has been a storybook,” Mani says. “It’s taken me places that I never could have dreamed.”