Great martian meteorites!!

I love meteorites. I love the idea of being able to hold a piece of another world in your hand, feel its weight, see the way it reflects light as you turn it round and round in front of your eyes. I love looking at them and thinking about how long they drifted silently through space before screaming and screeching through Earth’s atmosphere to slam into the ground, completing their millennia long journey. I love taking them along to my Outreach talks and showing them to and sharing them with people. I love giving a talk to a classroom full of kids then letting them hold one of my meteorites, and watching their eyes grow side with wonder as it hits them that they’re Actually Holding Something From Space…

And when I see meteorites sitting on the surface of Mars, fallen star stones that have come from Who Knows Where, it makes me fall in love with them all over again.

I have a small collection of meteorites, perhaps twenty, twenty five specimens, that I use in my Outreach work. Some I bought myself, some were gifts from friends (Hi Bev! Hi CAS members!), and others, quite a few others actually, were donated to me by collectors who wanted to support my Outreach work in schools. Occasionally I lend my meteorite collection to my local museum, here in Kendal, and they always prove very popular with visitors…

I have some favourites, of course. I adore the big hefty hunk-a-chunk piece of the Canyon Diablo meteorite that was a gift to me from my friend in Australia, it goes with me every time I give a talk somewhere…

I also love my piece of the famous Sikhote Alin meteorite that exploded in a shower of shrapnel above the Sikhote Alin mountains in Russia in 1947…

… and I have a very soft spot for my little twisted, tortured and contorted piece of the Imilac meteorite that came down in Chile’s Atacama desert, too…

Like all meteorite collectors, I dream, of finding my own star stone. But meteorites are hard to find. Think about it. 2/3 of Earth is covered with water, so that means 2/3 of the meteorites that fall from the sky go “plop” and are never found. Others will fall into rainforests, or onto mountain ranges or other godforsaken places. The ones that fall into or close to populated areas are hard to find because they will quickly rust away or be buried and lost in undergrowth or simply urban sprawl. But there are places where meteorites can be found, if you have the time, dedication and money to go looking. Meteorite collectors scour the sandy deserts and the snowy wastelands of our planet in search of new meteorites. The meteorites stand out because a) there are very few “native” stones in those areas, and b) they are much darker than their surroundings. So you will often find meteorite collectors scouring the Sahara desert, or the ice plains of Antarcticam, looking for new fallen star stones…

Another good place for meteorite hunting is Mars. Why? Well, there’s basically nothing much there to hide them. Yes, there are lots of rocks, but there are no forests, lakes or oceans. Most martian rocks look the same, but meteorites look very different, and really stand out on the martian surface. Also, Mars has been collecting meteorites for literally billions of years, and with to rain or weather to erode the meteorites away, the red planet is a veritable planet-sized meteorite museum…

So it’s no surprise that our two intrepid Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have found a few meteorites during their epic treks across the floor of Gusev Crater and the great wide open Meridiani Plain respectively.

Opportunity spotted the first meteorite in January 2005, as she was studying the crumpled turned-inside-out remains of her own backshell, close to the edge of Endurance Crater. Right from first glance it was pretty obvious that the basketball-sized object a few metres away from the backshell wasn’t a normal martian rock…

Oppy drove up for a closer look… you can enjoy her view if you have a pair of 3D glasses handy and click on this image to bring up a large version…

And when the red, green and blue Pancam images came back, rover enthusiasts like me scrambled to make our own ‘true colour’ images from them, revealing “Heat Shield meteorite” in all its glory…

 

Seriously, how gorgeous is that? 🙂 That’s a METEORITE, sitting on the surface of Mars. It fell from the sky universe knows how many thousands or millions of years ago… and then, in 2004, something else almost fell on it from out of the sky – a huge piece of a Mars rover heat shield!

As Harry Hill would say, “What are the chances of that happening, eh?” 🙂

Of course, Spirit wasn’t going to be left out, and in 2006 she spotted a meteorite on the side of the Columbia Hills, close to a large chunk of dark, pitted rock with a rather wicked looking blade of sharp rock sticking out from under it…

Here’s a close-up of the Allan Hills Rock…

Now it’s Oppy’s turn to don the “Meteorite Hunter” badge. After initially racing past it on her way to Endeavour Crater she’s now gone back for a closer look at a big -1m across – chunk of dark rock that stood out against the brighter Meridiani landscape. This is what she saw when she pulled up alongside “Block Island”…

“Fascinating”, a certain Vulcan would say, raising one eyebrow. Let’s take a closer look…

Fancy a 3D view? Of course you do…

Now that’s impressive. It looks, I think, a lot like the Heat Shield meteorite, quite ragged and torn in places. I also think it looks a lot like a meteorite found in Antarctica, the Derrick Peak meteorite…

We’re going to get closer looks at Block Island over the next few days, I;m sure, but for now just think about how amazing the rovers are to be able to show us things like that. 5 years into their 90 day mission they’re still surprising us, still exciting us, still making our eyes go wide with wonder.

Just like meteorites… 🙂

UPDATE:

In the past couple of days some new images of Block Island have come back from Oppy. Most people now seem to be agreed that it is a meteorite, but some still seem uncertain. Either way, it really is a fascinating rock!

Here’s a new, hi-resolution colour ‘portrait’ I’ve made…

Seen in this new 3D view, Block Island is even more intriguing…

In close-up, some amazing structure is revealed in the “Pit” over on the right hand side there…

Hmmm… something in that image is going to cause the tin foil hat wearing “Look! There’s a yeti on Mars!” brigade to almost wet their pants in excitement. Is that… could it be… it is! It’s the fossilied skull of a horrific alien martian, protruding from the meteorite..!

Over the next few days we’re going to see a LOT more of Block Island. I wonder what the other side looks like? What the underside looks like? Surely Oppy is going to circle this fascinating object like a shark circling a bleeding swimmer. I can’t wait for the next pics to come back!