Devastation caused by the explosion of a meteroid at low altitude in the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. (Imge: Wikipedia) Every Thursday lunchtime here at the Open University, a small band of enthusiasts meet up to discuss, well, just about anything really, but mainly meteorites. Of course, the group has a nice official title:…
Muawia Shaddad (center right) and Peter Jenniskens (center left) point towards a fragment of the Almahata Sitta meteorite, in the company of several students from the University of Khartoum. (Image: Peter Jenniskens/SETI institute). Almahata Sitta arrived on Earth with a bang. It was the first recovered meteorite to be tracked in space (as Asteroid 2008…
Image: Estelle Greenwood OK, so you’ve got this idea for a Sci-Fi movie: Scene one: A lonely Arizona astronomer locates a small asteroid. He finds that it is going to collide with Earth within hours. Scene two: Across the globe, frantic astronomers launch a desperate attempt to find out as much as they can about…
The asteroid Itokawa from which the Hayabusa spacecraft has successfully returned sample material to Earth (Image: JAXA) As you may remember, a couple of weeks back, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that, after all, the Hayabusa spacecraft had collected extraterrestrial particles from the asteroid Itokawa. This came as a bit of a shock…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 