Meteorites

The first dust samples ever retrieved from an asteroid and brought back for study show that a portion of the most common meteorites to hit Earth may have come from a single rocky ancestor in space, Japanese researchers say. In a wide-ranging analysis of tiny fragments collected from the asteroid Itokawa during a spacecraft visit in 2005, six studies by several teams of scientists released Thursday by the journal Science piece together a detailed...

A report claiming to find remnants of alien life in meteorites has been broadly dismissed by scientists after its publication Friday in an eccentric online journal. The report was written by Richard Hoover, an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. He had sliced open a couple of small meteorites, looked at them under a microscope and seen what he thought were the fossils of tiny bacteria called cyanobacteria. Hoover wrote his report, concluding that life is common throughout the universe.

Tiny meteorites found in ultra-pure Antarctic snow may provide scientists with evidence that the building blocks of life may have come from within our own solar system, rather than from the far reaches of space, researchers reported in a paper published online Thursday in the journal Science. Scientists have for years been trying to mark a clear line between which materials, including carbon-rich organic materials, formed within our solar system and which came from outer space. "This line is very, very difficult to draw," said study lead author Jean Duprat, a physicist at the University of Paris-South in France.

Following a fireball that lit up the night sky and a sonic boom that rattled houses over the Midwest, another phenomenon is arriving in southwestern Wisconsin: meteorite hunters. On Friday a man from Lake Forest, Ill., reported the recovery of the first pieces of a large, disintegrating meteor that lit up the night sky Wednesday. Professional meteorite hunters and dealers have been descending on an area outside Livingston, a Wisconsin village of about 600. That's where Terry Boudreaux, a private meteorite collector, found two neighboring farmers who each said they had found a small meteorite.

Brian H. Mason, a Smithsonian scientist internationally known for his study of meteorites and moon rocks and who was the first to discover that a rock found in Antarctica came from the moon, has died. He was 92. Mason died of renal failure Dec. 3 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. "Brian Mason was probably the best known and most revered geochemist of his generation," said Sorena S. Sorensen, chairwoman of the Department of Mineral Sciences at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

There is much more water on Mars than anyone had thought -- possibly twice as much as in Greenland's ice sheet, scientists said Thursday. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted ice in five recently formed meteorite craters midway between the northern pole and the equator, researchers said in a report in the journal Science. That's the farthest south the underground ice sheet has been found. The spacecraft's instruments were able to confirm that the bluish material inside the crater was, indeed, ice. "Buried ice on Mars is much more extensive than we had thought," Shane Byrne, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said at a news briefing Thursday at the Jet Propulsion Lab in La Cañada Flintridge.

Two of the world's most famous meteorites failed to attract buyers at an auction, but an ordinary metal mailbox zapped by a falling space rock in 1984 was sold for nearly $83,000. A 30-pound chunk of the Willamette Meteorite, found in Oregon in 1902, and the 1,410-pound Brenham Main Mass, dug out of a Kansas farm field in 2005, were withdrawn from sale when bids fell far short of expectations.

Steve Arnold is driving the yellow Hummer in circles around a Kiowa County wheat field, towing an 18-foot-wide metal detector. For an hour, nothing but silence. Finally, the detector whines and Arnold slams the brakes. "That is so good," he says. Arnold jumps out, pinpoints the location with a smaller detector and starts digging. The world-renowned meteorite hunter is hoping for a big score.

A mysterious object that crashed through the roof of a home and landed in the bathroom was a meteorite, experts said. No one was injured. For now, scientists are calling the dense metallic object "Freehold Township" after the place where it fell. The meteorite, about the size of a golf ball, weighs about 13 ounces. Geologists determined it was an iron meteorite because of its density and magnetic properties.

Scientists were excited to pull a 154-pound meteorite embedded in a Kansas wheat field -- especially because of the way they unearthed it. The team used groundpenetrating radar technology to locate the mass 4 feet under a meteorite-strewn field Monday. "It validates the technique so we can use something similar to that instrument when we go to Mars," said Patricia H. Reiff, director of the Rice Space Institute in Houston.