Partially open cabinet drawer filled with multiple small transparent containers in an orderly arrangement.

Meteorite Collection at the MPS

Modern archive rooms with gray cabinets and shelves; a woman is using a ladder to open a drawer; stones are lying on a table. — The collection at the MPS houses 4,780 meteorite samples in cabinets and drawers.

© © MPS / T. Klawunn

The collection at the MPS houses 4,780 meteorite samples in cabinets and drawers.

© © MPS / T. Klawunn

The research meteorite collection of the Max Planck Society comprises nearly 5,000 samples representing more than 1,900 different meteorites, making it one of the largest and most diverse meteorite collections worldwide. It comprises a broad range of meteoritic materials, from primitive chondrites to differentiated meteorites, including iron and stony-iron meteorites, achondrites, and meteorites from the Moon and Mars.

The collection brings together the former research meteorite collections from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, where cosmochemical and meteoritic research was established in the 1950s and 1960s. After more than two decades of scientific curation, expansion, and research at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, the combined collection has been housed at the MPS since 2026.

From its beginnings, the collection has been developed primarily as a research collection. Its broad coverage of meteorite classes and parent bodies provides access to materials that record diverse formation environments, processes, and stages in the evolution of the Solar System. Together with the metal-free laboratories and high-precision isotope analytical facilities at the MPS, the collection provides an exceptional resource for investigating the formation and evolution of planetary bodies and the Solar System as a whole.

Mission

A Look Inside the Drying Cabinet — Iron and iron-stone meteorites are stored in special drying cabinets, where they are protected from rusting.

© MPS / T. Klawunn

Iron and iron-stone meteorites are stored in special drying cabinets, where they are protected from rusting.

© MPS / T. Klawunn

The mission of the Meteorite Collection at the MPS is to advance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Solar System through cutting-edge research on meteorites. The collection serves as a long-term scientific resource for research at the MPS, supporting the development and application of state-of-the-art analytical approaches to address fundamental questions in planetary science.

We are committed to the careful curation, documentation, preservation, and strategic development of the collection, ensuring that scientifically valuable and often irreplaceable materials remain available for present and future research.

The collection furthermore provides a basis for scientific collaboration. We pursue collaborative projects with researchers worldwide where complementary expertise, analytical capabilities, and scientific questions create opportunities to advance shared research goals and open new avenues of investigation.