Found Meteorites Could Aid Asteroid Studies

Graced by astronomical serendipity, scientists now have in their hands the fragments of an asteroid they'd tracked, from its journey through space to its collision with Earth last October.

The meteorites—surviving remnants of the 80,000-kg asteroid—sprayed over the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan (Nature 2009, 458, 485).

Asteroids contain the best record of the origin of the solar system, but scientists have not been able to link them to the meteorites they've collected so far. The location, size, and composition of asteroids are needed to study their roles in solar system formation.

"We have 40,000 samples of meteorites, but we don't know where a single one of them came from," Michael E. Zolensky, a cosmic mineralogist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., said at a press conference held on March 24. "What???s different this time is that we know exactly which asteroid these meteorites came from," he said.

Astronomers followed the asteroid's trajectory as it broke apart in the atmosphere over the desert, then collected hundreds of the dark, fragile, and porous meteorites. The meteorites belong to a rare class known as ureilites.

"No one had to write a proposal" to find the meteorites, Lucy McFadden, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park, said at the conference. "They landed right on our doorstep."