A Meteorite Detective Story

Professor Colin Pillinger in front of the meteorite from Lake House. (image: Andy Tindle) Everyone likes a good detective story. And at the heart of any serious who-dun-it there has to be a tenacious sleuth, who stops at nothing to find the truth. In the finest tradition of the genre here comes the tale of…

Tissint – So what’s all the fuss about?

Oued Tissint, Morocco close to where the Tissint Martian meteorite was recovered in October 2011 (image: Wikipedia). Following my last post on the SNC meteorites, there was a bit of frenzy in the media about the latest Martian arrival, known as Tissint. Now, I am of course not claiming that this unprecedented media interest was…

It came from Mars – or did it?

Mars – Source of the SNCs?(image: NASA) Recently, we have been running a fair few SNCSs on our oxygen isotope line here at the Open University. SNCs? You ask. What are they? Well, they are meteorites that come from Mars. From Mars! How do you know that then? Now, that is a very good question!…

Vesta – The Asteroid that refused to Die

The NASA Dawn spacecraft is now in its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) 210 km above the surface of the asteroid 4 Vesta (image: NASA). The NASA Dawn mission continues to send back breathtaking images of the asteroid 4 Vesta, which it has been studying in detail since July 2011. In mid-December the spacecraft successfully…