This is the first time in thirty years that a meteorite has been recovered in the UK.
The trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Scientists have sent daring missions to the nature of space to grab some asteroids. (Here you look at you, Hayabusa2 and Osiris-Rex.) After a conspicuous fireball meteor blew across the UK on 28 February, scientists recovered some of the valuable fragments it had scattered on the ground.
“For the first time in thirty years, a meteorite has been recovered in the UK after it ended up in the driveway of a house in Gloucestershire,” the Natural History Museum in London said in a statement on Tuesday. The museum calls the carbonaceous chondrite meteorite ‘surprisingly rare’ and says it will give scientists a glimpse into the early solar system, which dates back to 4.6 billion years ago.
Since the dark, brittle rock landed in the city of Winchcombe, it has been known as the “Winchcombe meteorite.” According to the museum, carbonaceous chondrite meteorites are “made from a mixture of minerals and organic compounds, including the building blocks of life itself: amino acids.”
One of the larger pieces of meteorite was found in a driveway in the town of Winchcombe in the United Kingdom.
UK Meteor Network
The rare meteorite left Natural History Museum researcher Sara Russell “speechless with excitement.” Nearly 10.6 ounces (300 grams) of the space rock has been recovered on the ground so far, providing scientists with a tremendous amount of material to study. Russell said the fragments look like material collected by the Hayabusa2 and Osiris-Rex space missions.
The UK Meteor Observation Network, a civilian science group that tracks meteoric observations, captured the fireball event on camera and helped limit the potential clutter field and probable origin of the meteor, which traces back to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
‘This is a history that is becoming,’ the UK Meteor Observation Network said in a statement. “Restoring a meteorite fragment with data from meteorocamera networks is a first for the UK.”
The rapid recovery and excellent conservation of the meteorite means that scientists have a pristine sample to investigate that will join research on asteroid material returning from space. Russell said, “It’s absolutely a dream come true.”
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