[Rockhounds] Meteorite That Crashed Into Michigan Contains 'Pristine' Organic Compounds

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The rapid recovery and analysis of a meteorite that fell onto a frozen lake
in Michigan two years ago is illuminating the pivotal role these rocks
played in delivering the basic building blocks for life to Earth.

As the meteorite was falling toward our planet on January 16, 2018, at
speeds reaching 36,000 miles per hour, its bright fireball could be seen in
parts of the U.S. midwest and portions of Ontario. Hundreds of witnesses
were privy to the lightshow, in an event that was captured by multiple
security cameras.

And with that, the race was on to retrieve the meteorite as quickly as
possible. The more time spent on the surface, and with possible exposure to
water, the more meteorite would become contaminated, preventing scientists
from studying the rock as it existed in space. The big prize, as it were,
is the recovery of pristine, untainted extraterrestrial organic compounds,
that is, carbon-based molecules that formed within the rock’s parent
asteroid.

“As soon as you get water, the metal starts to rust, and minerals like
olivine get altered,” Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum in
Chicago and the lead author of a new paper describing the meteorite,
explained in an email. “Water also brings in contaminants through the many
cracks that usually crisscross meteorites—cracks that formed when the
meteorite got ejected from its parent asteroid during a previous impact
event,” he added.

Using NASA’s weather radar, meteorite hunters tracked the velocity and
trajectory of the meteorite, allowing them to pinpoint the likely location
of the fallen object. In under 48 hours, a private meteorite hunter named
Robert Ward found a 0.8-ounce (22-gram) chunk of meteorite resting on the
frozen Strawberry Lake near Hamburg, Michigan. Ward and private collector
Terry Boudreaux decided to quickly donate and deliver the piece, dubbed the
Hamburg meteorite, to the Field Museum in Chicago.

https://gizmodo.com/meteorite-that-crashed-into-michigan-contains-pristine-1845493603