Jenniskens’ colleagues at the Natural History Museum officially announced that the first electron-beam microprobe studies of one of these fragments showed the typical mineralogy and chemical composition of an aubrite-type achondrite. The official classification now agrees with what many people suspected by looking at images of strange meteorites that crashed near Berlin on January 21, 2024. They belong to a rare group called “Aubrites”.

SETI Institute meteor astronomer Dr. “These were extremely difficult to find because from a distance they look like other rocks on Earth,” said Peter Jenniskens. “Up close, not really.”

Jenniskens, MfN, Museum of Nature (MfN) researcher Dr. Together with Lutz Hecht, he traveled from San Francisco to Berlin to survey the fields south of the village of Ribbeck. for the Luft und Raumfahrt and the Technical University of Berlin in the following autumn.

call detection

“Despite the excellent guidance of meteor astronomers Dr. Pavel Spurni, Jirzhi Borovychka and Luka S Śrbény, of the Institute of Astronomy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, calculated how strong winds blew the meteors away and predicted, based on the light emitted by the fireball, that they might be rare, enstatite-rich meteorites. “Our search team was not able to easily detect them on the ground at first,” Jenniskens said.

Unlike other meteors, which have a thin black glass shell caused by atmospheric heat, these meteors mostly have a translucent glassy shell.

“We only noticed the meteors after the Polish team of meteorite hunters spotted the first find and showed us what to look for,” Jenniskens said. said. “After that, our first findings were quickly made by Freie University students Dominique Dieter and Kara Weihe.”

Importance of meteorite collections

Meteorites were first detected by astronomer Dr. using a telescope at the Konkoli Observatory in Hungary. They are fragments of the small asteroid 2024 BX1 detected by Christian Sarnecki. Sarnecki was tracked by NASA’s Scout Collision Hazard Assessment Systems and ESA and was then predicted to enter Earth’s atmosphere. Meerkat Asteroid Guardian. and Davide Farnocchia of JPL/California Institute of Technology frequently updated the orbits, eventually producing the bright fireball seen and recorded in the video. This was Jenniskens’ fourth guided rescue from such a small asteroid impact, after hitting Sudan in 2008, Botswana in 2018 and France in 2023.

Today, Jenniskens staff at the Natural History Museum officially announced that the first electron-beam microprobe studies of one of these fragments confirmed the typical mineralogy and chemistry of aubrite-type achondrite. This result was submitted to the Meteorite Society’s International Nomenclature Commission on February 2, 2024 for review and approval.

The name of the meteorite comes from the village of Aubrey in France, where a similar meteorite fell on September 14, 1836. The piece is in the museum collection.

Scientific director of the museum’s meteorite collection, Dr. “Based on this evidence we were able to make a rough classification relatively quickly,” said Ansgar Greshacke. “This highlights the enormous importance of the collections for research. There is currently material from only eleven such observed falls in meteorite collections worldwide.”

“Obites do not look like how people usually imagine meteorites. Obrites look more like gray granite and are composed mainly of the magnesium silicates enstatite and forsterite,” said Christopher Hamann of the Museum of Natural History, who was involved in the initial classification and research. “It contains almost no iron, and the glassy crust by which meteorites are usually recognized looks very different from most other meteorites. That’s why it’s hard to detect obrites in the field.”