Space Topics: Near Earth Objects
The Year in Pictures: 2009
Celestial Object Found on Earth
Look, it's part of 2008 TC3!
Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum, Sudan and NASA meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens join students of the University of Khartoum at the location of one of the larger finds from the first search campaign, December 8, 2008.
Credit: Peter Jenniskens, SETI Institute
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One of the biggest stories of 2008 was the
discovery of an asteroid, briefly named 2008 TC3, just hours before it crashed into Earth. When it entered the
atmosphere and burned up on October 6 over a remote area of northern Sudan,
most people assumed that was the end of the story, but not Peter Jenniskens,
a meteor astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. He teamed
up with Muawia Shaddad, an astronomer at the University of Khartoum, to
organize an expedition to hunt for any fragments of the asteroid that may
have survived the trip through the atmosphere.
In December, Jenniskens, Shaddad,
and 45 students and staff set out from Station 6 of the local railway line,
following the flight trajectory of 2008 TC3. Within hours, they
found the first tiny fragment and named it “Almahata Sitta,”
Arabic for Station 6. As the expedition members walked along the flight path
over the coming days, they gradually saw the size of the meteorites increase
from small pebbles to that of chicken eggs. This photo is from the third day
of the expedition; Jenniskens, Shaddad, and a number of University of Khartoum
students point to one of those larger pieces.
Study of the meteorites proved
that they were a very unusual type, called a ureilite. Study of the spectra
of the parent asteroid, 2008 TC3, showed that it, too, was unusual, an F-class
asteroid. These results were announced in the March 26 issue of Nature magazine.
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