NASA | Ames Research Center | SETI | 2014 Aug 15
A meteorite that fell onto the roof of a house in Novato, California, on Oct. 17, 2012, has revealed a detailed picture of its origin and tumultuous journey through space and Earth's atmosphere. An international consortium of fifty researchers studied the fallen meteorite and published their findings in the August issue of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.End of flight fragmentation of the Nov. 18, 2012, fireball over the San Francisco Bay Area
(shown in a horizontally mirrored image to depict the time series from left to right).
These photographs were taken from a distance of about 65 km.
Image Credit: Robert P. Moreno Jr., Jim Albers and Peter Jenniskens
"Our investigation has revealed a long history that dates to when the moon formed from the Earth after a giant impact," says Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer and consortium study lead working for the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
Jenniskens captured the meteorite's fall in NASA's Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance and quickly calculated the likely fall area over the city of Novato. Novato residents Lisa Webber and Glenn Rivera then remembered hearing something hit their garage roof that night, found the first meteorite, and made it available for study. Often researchers use the location a meteorite was found to name to the rock; this meteorite now is officially known as "Novato" according to the Meteoritical Society. ...
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