[Rockhounds] Asteroid that impacted near Berlin identified as a rare Aubrite

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The official classification now aligns with what many suspected from merely
looking at the images of the strange meteorites that fell near Berlin on
January 21, 2024. They belong to a rare group called “aubrites”.

“They were devilishly difficult to find because, from a distance, they look
like other rocks on Earth,” said SETI Institute meteor astronomer Dr. Peter
Jenniskens <https://www.seti.org/our-scientists/peter-jenniskens>. “Close
up, not so much.”

Jenniskens traveled from San Francisco to Berlin to search the fields just
south of the village of Ribbeck with Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) researcher
Dr. Lutz Hecht, guiding a team of students and staff from the MfN, the
Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutches zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt, and
the Technische Universität Berlin in the days following the fall.

“Even with superb directions by meteor astronomers Drs. Pavel Spurný, Jiří
Borovička and Luká*š* Shrbený of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech
Academy of Sciences, who calculated how the strong winds blew the
meteorites, and predicted that these could be rare enstatite-rich
meteorites based on the light emitted by the fireball, our search team
initially could not easily spot them on the ground,” said Jenniskens.

Unlike other meteorites which have a thin crust of black glass from
atmospheric heat, these meteorites have a mostly translucent glass crust.

“We only spotted the meteorites after a Polish team of meteorite hunters
had identified the first find and could show us what to look for,” said
Jenniskens. “After that, our first finds were made quickly by Freie
Universität students Dominik Dieter and Cara Weihe.”

https://www.seti.org/press-release/asteroid-impacted-near-berlin-identified-rare-aubrite