The planetary science community has benefitted
greatly from research in Antarctica. The discovery of
large accumulations of meteorites in blue ice fields on
the polar plateau since 1969 and of cosmic dust
in Antarctic ice, snow and supraglacial
moraines as well as in loose sediment traps in the
Transantarctic Mountains since the late 1980s has
had a tremendous impact on the planetary science
community. Over the last 50 years tens of thousands of
meteorite specimens and cosmic dust particles have
been recovered by Japanese, US, European, Chinese
and Korean polar programs. This enormous research
effort has provided the international planetary science
community with the opportunity to study an extraordinary number of samples from a large variety of planetary bodies, greatly advancing our knowledge of the
origin and evolution of the solar system