Recently, the Mars Curiosity rover found a curiosity.
An iron meteorite sitting on the surface of Mars.
While probably not much different than iron meteorites from the asteroid belt that also
fall here on earth, the folks at JPL are taking a look anyway to see if there's anything interesting
going on.
In celebration, here are ten really strange and unusual meteorites that have landed here
on earth.
10.
Pieces of Vesta
While most meteorites that fall to earth originate in the asteroid belt, occasionally we can
study the chemical makeup of these meteorites and compare them to what we know about the
compositions of asteroids and nail down specific meteorites that originate from specific asteroids.
While several meteorites have been linked with their parent asteroids, the most noteworthy
are a group of meteorites that originated from the asteroid Vesta, one of the largest
in the asteroid belt and an asteroid that the Dawn Spacecraft visited and studied throughout
2011.
It was learned that Vesta underwent a huge impact sometime within the last billion years
that explains why so many meteorites from it have fallen on earth.
While not really rare but not common either, these meteorites, called achondrites, are
igneous in nature and stand apart from normal meteorites which are typically much more primitive
conglomerations of much older material.
This has yielded much information about the makeup of the asteroid Vesta.
9.
The Ensisheim Prisoner
On November 7, 1492 a very unusual thing happened in France.
Numerous people, including the artist Albrecht Durer, observed the fall of a meteorite in
a wheat field in the town of Ensisheim.
Amid much superstition and talk of an omen, the local townspeople picked up the pieces
which caught the attention of the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III whose local
magistrate ordered the stone preserved.
While some bits and pieces of the meteorite were sent to notable people such as the future
Pope Pius III, most of the stone was chained up in the local church to prevent it from
wandering off the way it came.
There it stayed for centuries.
It's no longer chained up and is now kept in a local museum pretty much intact and just
as it fell five centuries ago.
8.
Moon Rocks You can Own
Meteorites from the moon aren't so much a mystery of why they would be here, we are
right next to it, but why we have so few of them.
As one of the rarest materials on Earth, lunar meteorites are eagerly sought after for scientific
study even with all of the samples brought back by the Apollo missions.
That's because they tell us about the diversity of lunar geology being from areas of the moon
where we have not been.
But they can also be privately owned.
Certain lunar meteorites, usually originating from finds in the deserts of North Africa
are weathered from hundreds of years of being on the surface of the earth and as a result
less interesting to science and can be bought from reputable meteorite dealers, though cheap
they are not.
7.
The Stone of Emesa
In the ancient greco-roman world, strange stones were revered as religious objects.
Called an omphalos, some of these stones were probably meteorites, thought by the ancients
to be rocks Zeus was throwing from Olympus.
One such stone, called the Black Stone of Emesa, seems to fit the bill as a meteorite,
though we can never be sure.
But it certainly had quite a history.
The insane Roman Emperor Elagabalus, for example, had it transported to Rome so he could revere
it and apparently had plans to marry it.
That did not happen, he was assassinated and the stone was returned to Emesa by the much
more down-to-earth emperor that succeeded him.
6.
Canyon Diablo
Sometimes the meteorites themselves are less famous than the effects they have on the planet.
The Canyon Diablo meteorite is one of the most common meteorites, it's so common that
you can buy pieces of it at gem shows for just a few dollars.
It's also an interesting meteorite containing more than just crystalline iron and nickel
from the core of an asteroid, but also odd graphite inclusions and even diamonds.
And it also happens to have been the meteorite that created the mile-wide Meteor Crater in
Arizona, earth's best preserved example of what happens when a meteorite the size of
a large house hits a planet.
5.
The Near Miss
Occasionally a meteorite will enter the earth's atmosphere at a shallow enough angle that
it will skip off back into space.
That very thing happened in 1972 when a large meteorite, thought to be between 10 and 45
feet wide entered the atmosphere above Utah and tracked northward over Alberta until exiting
the atmosphere completely.
This is thought to have consumed about half of the mass of the object and greatly altered
its orbit.
Though not certain, some suggest it still passes close by earth.
Perhaps we'll get it yet.
4.
The Big Smack
And then there are the big meteorites that do find their mark.
For some reason, this often happens in Russia, presumably due to the enormous size of that
country.
In fact, just a few years ago a large meteorite made headlines as it was filmed detonating
wildly in the upper atmosphere over Chelyabinsk releasing a total amount of energy equivalent
to 29 Hiroshima atomic bombs and a shock wave that shattered windows and tragically injured
residents across the region, even causing sunburn on some people it was so bright.
But that was not a once in a lifetime event.
And no, I don't mean the famous 1908 Tunguska event.
On February 12,1947 local residents in the Sikhote-Alin Region of Russia saw a massive
bolide brighter than the sun passing overhead leaving a large trail of smoke in its wake.
Due to this meteorite being made of sturdy nickel-iron, a large portion of it made it
to the surface of the earth, about 80 tons.
It literally went off like a hand grenade in an air burst close to the ground littering
a mountainside with twisted pieces of iron meteorite shrapnel.
Had this happened in a heavily populated area, the effects would have been devastating.
3.
Allende
Meteorites can be heavily modified by geologic processes creating changes due to pressure
and even melting.
But sometimes they are not and can represent windows into the early days of our solar system.
Just such a meteorite was observed to fall in 1969 over Mexico.
Locals in the area of a town named Pueblito de Allende picked up literally tons of meteorites
which proved to be a boon for scientists.
Allende turned out to be a very primitive meteorite that included calcium-rich inclusions
within the meteorite that are the oldest objects native to our solar system having been the
first materials to condense out of the early solar nebula.
But it doesn't end there, also contained within the meteorite are grains of matter that pre-date
the solar system and originate from interstellar space.
2.
The Murchison Meteorite
Asteroids and planets are not the only sources for meteorites in our solar system.
I would be remiss if I didn't include comets, which can be the sources of some of the most
interesting meteorites that give us clues about the origins of life on earth.
Observed to fall in Australia in 1969 a few months after its cousin Allende, the Murchison
meteorite provided another unique perspective on our early solar system to the scientists
of the time.
Given that this meteorite was observed to fall, samples were picked up very early before
the meteorite had time to be contaminated by earth's environment.
It was so fresh in fact that when researchers opened up bags containing the meteorites they
were hit with a strong, alcohol-like smell hinting that this was no normal run-of-the-mill
meteorite.
They would go on to find that this meteorite contained unusual amounts of water, alcohol,
hydrocarbons and something much more interesting.
Contained within this meteorite, which is thought to have possibly originated in a comet,
scientists found amino acids, the building blocks of life.
While abiotic, you don't need life to create these amino acids, their presence suggests
that the building blocks of organic chemistry and life itself were delivered to earth by
primitive asteroids or comets.
1.
The Meteorites of Mars
The planet Mars has also been a source of meteorites that offer tantalizing hints that
Mars once supported life, see my video on the Allen Hills 84001 meteorite for an in-depth
exploration of that meteorite.
But it's not alone in its strangeness.
In 2014 researchers found that another meteorite found in Antarctica known as Yamato 000593
appeared to have been altered by liquid water in the past and contained tiny tunnels and
carbon-rich spherules that may have been formed by life.
By comparing this meteorite with another known meteorite from Mars where the same tracks
were found, they were able to show that the tracks were probably not of earthly origin
and were present in the rock before it fell to earth.
Taken in conjunction with disputed findings from Allen Hills 84001 which also seemed to
contain what might be traces of bacterial life, these findings are tantalizing to be
sure but they do not constitute proof that life exists or once existed on Mars.
For that, we need samples directly from the surface of Mars that rule out any possibility
of earth contamination and even then, we need unique, non-earth DNA or chemistry that can
only have been created by life.
Thanks for listening, I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently
with the windows open enjoying a nice fall day and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online retailer and subscribe to my channel for in-depth, regular explorations
into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.