Meteorites | Universe Today

Opportunity has come upon another big rock on Mars. But what is it? Another meteorite? A big clump of ejecta from an old impact? There's lots of other debris scattered around this area as well. The rock has been named "Marquette Island," staying with the island theme for the other meteorites Oppy has come across, and the rover may take the "opportunity" to get closer to this rock and check it out, given the sand dunes surrounding it don't provide too much of an obstacle. So maybe next week we'll find out what it is. But in the meantime, enjoy these color and 3-D images (see more below) of the rock via Stu Atkinson from Unmannedspaceflight.com. Check out more great looks at Marquette Island at Stu's blog about Oppy's travels, Road to Endeavour.

Oh, and rumor has it that the extrication process may have begun to free the Spirit rover. Latest images show she has moved every so slightly. More as it becomes available….
Read more…

Filed under: Mars, Meteorites | 2 Comments »

A possible meteorite fall near in northern Latvia on Sunday left a crater approximately 20 meters (66 feet) in diameter and 10 meters (33 feet) deep. UPDATE: Many reports now say the impact was a fake; The Bad Astronomer says "shovel" marks were found around the perimeter of the crater; additionally, a burning impactor is highly unlikely (see video below). And here's an article from the Associated press. , and another from Yahoo news, where a phone company in Latvia admits the "crater" was a publicity stunt.

Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 20 Comments »

Three golf ball-sized fragments have been found from a meteorite that created a brilliant fireball seen over Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2009. The first meteorite fragment recovered did some damage to the windshield of a Nissan Pathfinder, and now two other fragments have been found on nearby properties. The meteor made headlines initially because it was captured on video by Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) on seven of its ‘all-sky’ cameras. The brightness was estimated to be approximately 100 times brighter than a full moon.
Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 4 Comments »

A brilliant fireball seen over Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2009 was captured by seven all-sky cameras of the University of Western Ontario's Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN.) The fireball was seen widely by observers throughout southern Ontario and adjacent areas. The fireball was first detected by Western's camera systems at an altitude of 100km, and moving southeastwards at 20.8 km/s. From the data collected, the researchers believe the meteoroid was initially about a meter wide, or about the size of a child's tricycle. At its brightest, the fireball was approximately 100 times as bright as the full moon.
Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 4 Comments »

The first asteroid to have been spotted before hitting Earth, 2008 TC3, crashed in northern Sudan one year ago on October 6. Several astronomers have been trying to piece together a profile of this asteroid, pulling together information from from meteorites found at the impact site and the images captured of the object in the hours before it crashed to Earth. “We have a gigantic jigsaw puzzle on our hands, from which we try to create a picture of the asteroid and its origins,” said SETI Institute astronomer Peter Jenniskens, who worked at the crash site, "and now we have with a composite sketch of the culprit, cleverly using the eyewitness accounts of astronomers that saw the asteroid sneak up on us.” Their description? 2008 TC3 looked like a loaf of walnut-raisin bread.
Read more…

Filed under: Asteroids, Meteorites | 5 Comments »

It's amazing what a rover can find laying by the side of the road. The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found a rock that apparently is another meteorite. Less than three weeks ago, Opportunity drove away from a larger meteorite called "Block Island" that the rover examined for six weeks. Now, this new meteorite, dubbed "Shelter Island," is another fairly big rock, about 47 centimeters (18.8 inches) long, that fell from the skies. Block Island is about 60 centimeters (2 feet) across and was just 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) away from this latest meteorite find. At first look, the two meteorites look to be of a similar makeup; Opportunity found that Block Island was is made of nickel and iron.

This image was taken during Oppy's 2,022nd Martian day, or sol, (Oct. 1, 2009).

See below for a 3-D version of this image created by Stu Atkinson.
Read more…

Filed under: Mars, Meteorites | 24 Comments »

Archeologists have been divided about whether an extraterrestiral impact blasted North America about 12,900 years ago, wreaking havoc on Earth's surface and sending scores of species — including a pygmy mammoth and the horse — into oblivion.

New clues from California's Channel Islands should put any doubt to rest, says an international team of researchers.

Read more…

Filed under: Asteroids, Earth, Meteorites, Solar System | 5 Comments »

Maybe we're not as old as we think (or feel?). The interstellar stuff that was integrated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

Heck's team analyzed 22 interstellar grains from the Murchison meteorite. Dying sun-like stars flung the Murchison grains into space more than 4.5 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Scientists know the grains formed outside the solar system because of their exotic composition.
Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 3 Comments »

Classify this under news of the weird. A Russian scientist claims that aliens downed the Tunguska meteorite 101 years ago to protect our planet from devastation. Yuri Lavbin says he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive Siberian explosion. Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and other have drawings on them. "We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals," said Lavbin. "We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

OK, just a few holes in this story, too.
Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 41 Comments »

A miniature meteorite unlike any other has been discovered in Antarctica. The tiny rock, known as MM40, is the first achondritic basaltic micrometeorite ever found on Earth. Detailed analysis shows it has an unusual chemical composition the researchers say raises questions about where it originated in the Solar System and how it was created. "We have basaltic meteorites that are thought to come from an asteroid called 4 Vesta and we also have basaltic meteorites from the Moon and Mars," said Dr. Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum, London "But MM04's chemistry does not match any of those places. It has to be from somewhere else."

Read more…

Filed under: Meteorites | 22 Comments »

Officials are now saying the bright fireball seen over Virginia in the US on Sunday was probably a natural meteor event and not part of a Russian rocket, a reversal from yesterday's initial analysis. Space.com reported that an official from the U.S. Naval Observatory believed the loud boom and flash of light seen in the skies over Norfolk and Virginia Beach was likely the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched Expedition 19 to the International Space Station last Thursday. However, U.S. Strategic Command has since reported that the rocket re-entered Earth's atmosphere near Taiwan, on the other side of the world, several hours after the reports of the fireball. So both its timing and entry location rule out the rocket as the explanation for the fireball. But the investigation is continuing to determine exactly what the object was.
Read more…

Filed under: Asteroids, Meteorites | 4 Comments »

Remember in October 2008 when Asteroid 2008 TC3 hit the scene – literally? This was the first asteroid that was predicted –and predicted correctly — to impact the Earth. Luckily, it wasn't big enough to cause any problems, and its path was over a remote area in Africa. It streaked into the skies over northern Sudan in the early morning of October 7, 2008, and then exploded at a high 37 km above the Nubian Desert, before the atmosphere could slow it down. It was believed that the asteroid likely had completely disintegrated into dust. But meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens thought there might be a chance to recover some of the remains of this truck-sized asteroid. And he was right.

Never before have meteorites been collected from such a high altitude explosion. Additionally, as it turns out, the assembled remnants are unlike anything in our meteorite collections, and may be an important clue in unraveling the early history of the solar system.
Read more…

Filed under: Asteroids, Meteorites | 3 Comments »

A fireball seen over Texas during the daytime on Sunday, Feb. 15th, triggered widespread reports that debris from the recent satellite collision was falling to Earth. The FAA even issued a statement that airplanes should watch for falling debris. However, those reports and statements were premature. Researchers have studied video of the event and concluded that the object was more likely a natural meteoroid about one meter wide traveling more than 20 km/s–much faster than orbital debris. Meteoroids hit Earth every day, and the Texas fireball was apparently one of them. Additionally, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command said the fireball spotted in the Texas skies Sunday was unrelated to the satellite collision. And as always, the Bad Astronomer was on top of it from the beginning, so check out his first post here (which includes several updates as the news broke), and a follow-up here. There were other fireballs, too….
Read more…

Filed under: Asteroids, Meteorites | 6 Comments »

Astronomers have analyzed the cometary fireball that blazed across the sky over Europe last year and concluded it was a dense object, about a meter (3.2 feet) across and with a mass of nearly two tons – large enough that some fragments probably survived intact and fell to the ground as meteorites.

Last July, people in Spain, Portugal and France watched the brilliant fireball produced by a boulder crashing down through the Earth’s atmosphere. In a paper to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomer Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain, and his co-authors present dramatic images of the event. The scientists also explain how the boulder may originate from a comet which broke up nearly 90 years ago, and suggest that chunks of the boulder (and hence pieces of the comet) are waiting to be found on the ground.

Read more…

Filed under: Astronomy, Comets, Earth Observation, Meteorites | 3 Comments »

Incoming! Hundreds of small objects, mostly asteroid fragments, impact Mars every year. Sometimes, like on Earth, objects break up in the Martian atmosphere. But Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, meaning more stuff hits the ground on the Red Planet. If a bolide breaks apart and but doesn't disintegrate, the result can be a cluster of craters. The image here is an example of that, with this group of recently made small impact craters. Although small Martian crater clusters are common, this example is unusual because there is a dark line between the two largest craters. The HiRISE scientists hypothesize that atmospheric breakup created two nearly equal-size objects that impacted close together in space and time so the air blasts interacted with each other to disturb the dust along this line. Wow!
Read more…

Filed under: Mars, Meteorites | 7 Comments »