|
Meteorite News - Meteorites
in the News
Expanded Meteorite News Headlines from Around The World
A small meteorite fell from the sky and crashed through the roof of a doctor's office in Virginia, but luckily no one was hit, experts say. The half-pound meteorite struck the Lorton, Va office of Dr. Frank Ciampi, a general practice physician, on Monday evening while he was on the second floor of his two-story building.
WEDNESDAY 20TH 9 pm EST - ONLY ON SCIENCE CHANNEL
Visit the official Science Channel Meteorite Men website for Meteorite Men show times, an illustrated episode guide with details about their hunting locations, exclusive video clips from the show including special behind-the-scenes material, the new promo trailers, a photo gallery and much more!
A professional meteorite hunter from Portland, Ore., is about to put a piece of the famed Grimsby space rock up for sale on the Internet.
But Rob Wesel says he's not likely to get back the money he spent on the cross-continent adventure he took to find the loonie-sized 14.5 gram stone....
SILVER SPRING: Science Channel has commissioned LMNO Cable Group for six further episodes of Meteorite Men, which chronicles modern-day treasure hunters Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold as they traverse North America in search of lost pieces of our universe.
When “Meteorite Men,” a one-time special for Discovery’s Science Channel, was green-lighted for a six-episode season, the hosts knew where to take their giant metal detectors — the Odessa Meteor Crater.
“Our friends at Science Channel asked us to give them a list of places we’d like to hunt and this was at the top of our list,” said Geoffrey Notkin, one of the hosts of the show, which is being produced by Encino, Calif.-based LMNO Productions.
A SIX-year-old stargazer from Bratton Fleming who found what he thought was a meteorite in his back garden has been given a generous gift from one of the worlds most prolific meteorite collectors.
The story about his find which featured in the North Devon Journal was read online by Scottish meteorite collector Robert Elliott, who recently sold part of his vast collection at auction...
O. Richard Norton passed away at Hospice House in Bend, Oregon, on May 17 after a long illness. A life-long educator and the author of popular books and articles about meteorites, astronomy and planetariums, Richard discovered his life’s passion when he built his first telescope at 14. His love for the sky and all things astronomical led him from an after-school job at Cave Optical Company in Long Beach, California, to a career in public science education.
While studying astronomy and meteoritics at UCLA, he was a lecturer at Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles. In 1957 he worked at the Nevada Test Site as a field researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission. There he witnessed the last 10 above-ground nuclear explosions and conducted research at the test site on the ecological effects of radiation. After graduation in 1960, he worked briefly as an optical engineer at Northrop Corporation and Tinsley Laboratories.
But he soon returned to his beloved planetariums. After 2 years at Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, in 1963 he became Director of the University of Nevada’s Fleischmann Planetarium in Reno, where he also taught astronomy. There Richard designed the world’s first 35mm fisheye motion picture system, called the Atmospherium, which was used to project realistic time-lapse motion pictures of developing weather systems onto the interior of a planetarium dome. His first book, The Planetarium and Atmospherium, An Indoor Universe, was published in 1969. He was a planetarium design engineer and consultant for Minolta Camera Company in Osaka, Japan. Richard became the founding director of the University of Arizona’s Flandrau Planetarium in 1973, where he continued teaching and co-designed a fisheye projection camera system which flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984, producing the first full sky motion pictures from space. In 1978 he started Science Graphics, a company that manufactured sets of teaching slides in astronomy and other sciences for use in college level courses.
Richard loved teaching and sharing his enthusiasm for astronomy, the space program, photography, geology and telescope making. He gave public lectures and taught community education classes, even venturing into the Arizona State Penitentiary to teach in maximum security and protective custody. He led field trips to Cape Canaveral, where he had his fisheye cameras at most Apollo launches, and on solar eclipse trips around the world, from Mexico to Romania.
In 1986 he moved to Bend, where he taught astronomy at Central Oregon Community College for 7 years. In Bend he rediscovered his early passion for meteorites. His book Rocks From Space was published in 1994, followed by The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites in 2002. His wife Dorothy Sigler Norton, who is a scientific illustrator, produced the illustrations and cover designs. The Field Guide to Meteors and Meteorites, published in 2008, was co-authored with Bend geologist Lawrence Chitwood. Many of Richard’s meteorites are on display at the Sunriver Nature Center in Sunriver, Oregon.
Richard loved classical music and had studied piano since the age of 7. In Bend he started a series of concerts called the Four Seasons, which were held for more than 10 years at the Norton home on the equinoxes and solstices.
Richard is survived by his wife Dorothy, his sister Gloria Berg, three children from previous marriages and a granddaughter.
SCIENCE CHANNEL’S METEORITE MEN TAKES VIEWERS ON
QUEST FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL TREASURE
-- New One-Hour Special World Premieres Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 9 PM (ET/PT) --
(Silver Spring, Md.) – For thousands of years meteorites have slammed into the earth’s surface,
each one carrying an invaluable record of the very beginnings of the solar system. But finding
meteorites, some buried over centuries by thick layers of dirt and sediment, is no easy task.
SCIENCE CHANNEL’S METEORITE MEN TAKES VIEWERS ON
QUEST FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL TREASURE
-- New One-Hour Special World Premieres Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 9 PM (ET/PT) --
(Silver Spring, Md.) – For thousands of years meteorites have slammed into the earth’s surface,
each one carrying an invaluable record of the very beginnings of the solar system. But finding
meteorites, some buried over centuries by thick layers of dirt and sediment, is no easy task.
Now, Science Channel is bringing viewers on a search for these alien treasures and revealing
these lost pieces of our universe for the first time in METEORITE MEN, world premiering
Sunday, May 10 at 9 PM (ET/PT).
Modern day treasure hunters Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold have travelled the world for years
to search as a team for remnants of ancient meteorites. In METEORITE MEN, viewers find
the pair in Brenham, Kansas where for more than a century pieces of a large meteorite that fell
thousands of years ago have been unearthed.
Science Channel treasure hunters Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold travel the world searching for meteorites, including fragments of one particular variety that needed the expert analysis of gemologists at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA).
The fragments in question, according to John Koivula, GIA’s chief gemologist and an expert on extraterrestrial and terrestrial gems, are from a rare stony-iron meteorite known as a pallasite, which contains glassy-looking crystalline fragments of transparent to translucent olivine. These were captured as inclusions in a massive network of two solid elemental metals, nickel and iron.
NEWMARKET, Ont. - People north of Toronto are being asked to lend a helping hand in tracking meteorite fragments that are suspected to have landed in the Newmarket area over the weekend.
The University of Western Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum are looking for meteorites that likely fell from a fireball in the sky just after 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
The university's southern Ontario Meteor Network has five cameras that captured the fireball as it crossed the night sky. Fragments are believed to have fallen between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe.
TORONTO — The hunt is on for meteorites that blazed to Earth last month and landed on rural land north of Newmarket, Ont.
The Royal Ontario Museum and University of Western Ontario have identified a 100-square-kilometre zone as the most likely debris range, stretching south-east of Mt. Albert to the edge of South Wynhurst, on the shores of Lake Simcoe.
Now, researchers have issued a call for meteorite-hunters and interested locals to start scouring the ground.
"Any time there's a fireball that looks like it's producing meteorites, we get quite excited because there's material to be recovered," said Royal Ontario Museum associate curator of mineralogy Kim Tait.
TORONTO, April 29 (UPI) -- Canadians living north and northeast of Toronto are being asked to help search for meteorite fragments from a fireball last month.
In a release, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario in London said analysis of a network of sky camera footage shows a slow-moving fireball swept eastward on March 15 at 8:37 p.m. near the small city of Newmarket.
Ontario scientists are looking for help in tracking down meteorite fragments they believe fell to Earth last month in an area just south of Lake Simcoe.
Five cameras from the University of Western Ontario's Southern Ontario Meteor Network recorded a fireball in the evening sky on March 15 at 8:37 p.m. ET.
Scientists at Western and the Royal Ontario Museum said Tuesday its modest brightness and slow descent suggest it may have dropped small meteorites in a region between Lake Simcoe and Newmarket, Ont., north of Toronto.
These meteorites may have a total mass of as much as a few hundred grams
TORONTO — Small meteorites may have been dropped on southern Ontario by a fireball that streaked through the sky north of Toronto.
Researchers are anxious to retrieve any possible fragments of what's believed to have been a meteorite that appeared over Newmarket, Ont., just after 8:30 p.m. ET on March 15. The Royal Ontario Museum and The University of Western Ontario are now asking residents in the area for their help in finding the space debris.
Five cameras recorded a slow fireball which may have dropped small meteorites in a region between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe.
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and The University of Western Ontario are looking for help from local residents in recovering a meteorite that fell to earth in the Newmarket, Ont. area
The call was from meteorite hunter Ruben Garcia who was seeking permission to hunt the land behind the Alligood/Bynum home when his hunting companion, Sonny Clary saw a two ounce meteorite sitting on the porch. With a little work they reached Alligood by phone at the car dealership where she works. “Did you know you have a meteorite on your porch?” said Garcia. “You mean the rock that Hopper found” replied Alligood.
“Ruben found the meteorite on the porch and the rest is history” Pauline Alligood
A meteorite hunter from Portland is donating part of a recent find to Portland State University.
Video: Fireball during Texas marathon
When Patrick Thompson heard about it, he decided to spend eight days looking for parts of the meteor and he was successful. After searching on foot an average of 25 miles a day, he ended up finding 14 fragments of the meteorite.
Meteorite hunters believe the sulfurous smell of the meteorite may have prompted Hopper to pick up the meteorite, or perhaps she just saw it bouncing and fetched it. Another possible explanation is that some dogs have a rock gathering trait.
News 8’s Bonnie Gonzalez speaks to one meteorite hunter and his new-found four-legged friend, Hopper.
Meteorite hunter Rob Wesel, from Portland, Ore., bought the rock, and like the rest of his fellow hunters, has become quite attached to the furry finder.
Today’s front-page story on the meteorite hunt going on in northern McLennan County around West is one of the most enjoyable, albeit exhausting, stories I’ve gotten to do as a journalist. Plus, any excuse to go to the CzechStop for kolaches works for me. My heritage is Czech, even if I lost some consonants in my last name somewhere on the way.
Meteorite hunters have descended in droves to the countryside surrounding this farming community, searching for the elusive pieces from a fireball that flared across the daytime sky over Central Texas and then broke apart.
FT. WORTH — As the first TV images of a meteor breaking apart over central Texas were aired Feb. 15, meteorite hunters around the world started grabbing their maps and booking flights. "I saw it within two hours of it happening on CNN," said meteorite hunter Michael Farmer of Tucson, Ariz. "By Tuesday, I was on a plane to Texas."
Now there's actual physical proof that it was a meteor. Amateur astronomer Doug Dawn and his team say they were able to find meteorites. Dawn's team analyzed the video footage shot by News 8 photographer Eddie Garcia. Dawn said there was a lot of information available in the film and it helped with calculations of where the material was coming from.
Scientists have, for the first time, detected a space rock ahead of a collision with Earth, watched it streak through the atmosphere, and then recovered pieces of it.
An analysis of the meteorites could shed light on conditions in the early solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
As the first television images of a meteor breaking apart over Central Texas were aired Sunday, meteorite hunters from around the world started grabbing their maps and booking flights
DALLAS — Two samples of fresh material the "size of large pecans" from a meteor that alarmed numerous residents when it streaked across the Texas sky on Sunday have been found by two University of North Texas astronomers in a pasture east of West.
The U.S. Strategic Command said it was likely a meteorite or other natural phenomenon. The agency says it has been monitoring the space debris from the recent collision of two Russian and U.S. satellites in space, and that none of the debris was in the vicinity of where the fireball appeared.
Asteroids are hunks of rock that orbit in the outer reaches of space, and scientists have generally assumed that their small size limited the types of rock that could form in their crusts. But two newly discovered meteorites may rewrite the book on how some asteroids form and evolve.
A glowing tomato-green fireball shot through the black Merced sky early Saturday, stunning those fortunate enough to see its brief life.
Merced resident Erika Knorn, 42, had awoken just before 2 a.m. to take her dog, Shadow, to the bathroom before returning to bed... Based on the descriptions he's read, Ward said Knorn and others probably saw a fireball, which is a brighter version of a meteor. Meteorites can be the size of microwave ovens and even refrigerators, he said. They travel between 11,000 and 30,000 miles an hour.
Ruben Garcia, known as Mr Meteorite has moved his collection of meteorite articles and meteorite video links to The Meteorite Exchange, Inc. website under the Meteorite Information menu.
LLOYDMINSTER, Alberta (AP) — Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.
University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late Thursday.
They said there could be thousands of meteorite pieces strewn over a 7-square-mile area of mostly flat, barren land, with few inhabitants.
Fragments of a huge meteorite that lit up the skies across Alberta and Saskatchewan last week have been found near the border city of Lloydminster, University of Calgary scientists say.
U of C planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley said Friday morning they located several meteorite fragments late Thursday afternoon.
They believe thousands of meteorite bits are strewn over a 20-square-kilometre area near the Battle River.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Searchers have found the remains of a 10-ton meteor that produced a dramatic fireball in the skies over the Canadian Prairies this month, researchers said on Friday.
Thousands of meteorite fragments have been found densely strewn over a 20-square-kilometre (8 square mile) area south of the community of Lloydminster on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, according to the University of Calgary.
A flash in the sky has many people in Western Canada asking questions.
According the RCMP in Lloydminster, a meteor fell from the northern skies at around 5:30 p.m. Thursday. It was visible from Edmonton, east from Lloydminister and into Saskatchewan, and as far south as the Regina area.
It's clear what most people across Alberta, Saskatchewan, even pockets of residents in Manitoba and North Dakota were talking about Thursday night.
Shortly after 5:30 p.m. local Mountain Time, CTV newsrooms and various media outlets were inundated with calls and emails that a giant fireball had streaked across the sky.
It's believed to be a meteor, but according to Alan Dyer with the Telus World of Science in Calgary, confirmation of what it was and where it landed may not be known for a few more days.
Prairie astronomers are investigating following last night's excitement about a ball of fire observed shooting from the northern sky.
Alan Dyer, an astronomer with Calgary's Telus World of Science, said sky-watchers will gather all the photographs and videos taken from various observation points to study the mysterious celestial show last night.
People who saw the huge flaming ball reported it possibly fell somewhere between Alberta and Saskatchewan.
About 5:30 p.m., a huge flash of light briefly turned the dark sky into daylight.
Meteorite investigators will focus in the area of Lloydminster and North Battleford, Sask., where reports of house-shaking came from, said Dyer.
People from Edmonton right through Saskatchewan and into Manitoba report having seen a fireball in the sky this evening.
Callers from every part of the province have given News Talk Radio their reactions.
In Lloydminster, people got so excited that RCMP issued a news release asking people to stop calling them. In the release, Mounties say that 'initial reports indicate that it was a meteor which fell from the northern skies.'
An intensely bright and colorful meteorite lit up the skies over the western Canadian province of Alberta and sparked hundreds of emergency calls to police.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local forces all began receiving calls around 5:30 p. m. Thursday, and some reports were called in from Manitoba to the east, the Edmonton Sun reported
Various people described the object as orange, green, yellow, purple or blue, the Edmonton Journal said.
MADISON TOWNSHIP -- Several local police departments and the State Highway Patrol searched with helicopters and manpower looking for what they thought might be a crashed ultralight plane Thursday afternoon.
Despite four hours of searching, officials found no plane and now believe the trailing light that witnesses saw fall across the sky may have been a meteor.
Madison Township police said they received several calls from witnesses who saw a red light flash across the sky with dark smoke trailing behind it near Townline Road and South Ridge Roads sometime after 2:20 p.m.
Residents in the area of Wallace Rockhole - west of Alice Springs - reported bright lights, the sound of an explosion and even feeling an earth tremor.
Geoscience Australia has confirmed it was almost certainly a meteorite.
But Michael Farmer, a hunter for Arizona, says under Australian legislation meteorites are considered protected property and this discourages fossickers.
TERRITORIANS were treated to an unexpected spectacle on Friday night.
What is believed to be a meteorite crashed near Wallace Rockhole near Hermannsburg, and was seen from as far away as Darwin.
Alice Springs Police received a report about 7pm of something that looked like a flare, but could not find anything. One Darwin stargazer described it as like nothing he had seen before.
NASA said Tuesday that its scientists had calculated a meteorite's trajectory and tracked its entry into Earth's atmosphere for the first time in the history of space exploration.
The 2-meter meteorite entered the atmosphere over Sudan at about 02:46 GMT Tuesday and broke into fiery fragments seconds later.
The specially prepared slab of rock was launched into space attached to a Russian spacecraft by University of Aberdeen experts in September last year as part of a European Space Agency mission.
Studies of the quarter of the rock which survived the journey have shown that if it had landed as a meteorite on another far distant planet and been tested by an alien life form, its chemical formations would have shown that life exists on other planets.
London, October 1 (ANI): A new study has suggested that scientists searching for life on Mars, should scout for white-coloured meteorites made of sedimentary rock.
According to a report in New Scientist, two rocks dropped from orbit by the European Space Agency (ESA) have shown that such meteorites can carry and protect traces of life from the heat of atmospheric re-entry and the shock of impact with the surface.
An artificial meteorite designed by the European Space Agency has shown that traces of life in a martian meteorite could survive the violent heat and shock of entry into the Earth's atmosphere. The experiment's results also suggest that meteorite hunters should widen their search to include white rocks if we are to find traces of life in martian meteorites.
A novel experiment has dealt a setback to a theory that life on Earth was kick started by bacteria that hitched a ride on space rocks.
The "pan-spermia" hypothesis is that cells were transported to the infant Earth on rocks that were bumped off other planets or even came from another star system.
The theory gained a boost in 1996 when a group of US scientists proposed that a famous meteorite found in Antarctica held traces of fossilised bacteria that once lived on Mars.
Seeking to find out more, European scientists have devised "artificial meteorites" to see what happens when rocks bearing fossil traces and living bacteria are exposed to the fiery heat of entering Earth's atmosophere.
An artificial meteorite designed by the European Space Agency has shown that traces of life in a martian meteorite could survive the violent heat and shock of entry into the Earth's atmosphere. The experiment's results also suggest that meteorite hunters should widen their search to include white rocks if we are to find traces of life in martian meteorites.
The origin of the microscopic meteorites that make up cosmic dust has been revealed for the first time in new research out 1 September 2008.
For the last few years, astronomers have faced a puzzle: The vast majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet. Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this discrepancy was hard to explain, but a team from MIT and other institutions has now found what it believes is the answer to the puzzle.
It seems that when the discussion of Martian and Lunar meteorites comes up two questions are always asked. First how do they get to Earth? And second...
The St. Thomas University professor was in town Thursday to install a special "all-sky" movie camera onto the roof of the French Fort Cove Eco-centre that will track meteors as they burn up in the atmosphere.
While he hopes the data gathered will help his research into meteorite impact craters, that is not the camera's main purpose.
Meteorites that fall to Earth usually come directly from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the population of larger space rocks that drifted in from the asteroid belt's innermost edge to hang around our planet's neighborhood.
Imagine staring into the sky and seeing a tiny yellow dot, gradually getting closer. That dot doubles in size every second, until it slowly darkens the sky. You realize that this dot is actually the size...
The Earth’s mass is 6,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 kilograms, roughly speaking and that is a lot of kilos. But tomorrow it will be just a little greater. Because today like everyday some rocks and dust fall into our gravity well and get caught. Most of this material will end up in the oceans since three-fourths of the Earth...
|
