ASU meteorite hunters find pieces from Arizona asteroid

A team of Arizona State University meteorite hunters located 15 pieces of an asteroid estimated to be 4.5 billion years old that illuminated the early-morning sky when it broke apart over eastern Arizona earlier this month, according to the university.

After searching for more than 132 hours, the ASU team, which worked in conjunction with the White Mountain Apache Tribe, found scattered pieces of the meteorite on tribal lands, according to Elizabeth Giudicessi, an ASU spokeswoman.

The scholars found the pieces after they were granted permission from the tribe to search, Giudicessi said.

The tribe will own the meteorites, but ASU will curate them, caring, storing and securing the meteorites in a low-humidity environment.

The meteorites are pieces that contribute to a bigger puzzle of where exactly they came from, Laurence Garvie, curator of ASU’s Center for Meteorite Studies, said.

“It’s an unbelievable discovery for us to all see and hear about the fantastic meteor event over eastern Arizona and then to search — and even better, to find — pieces from the asteroid," Garvie said. “I mean, this is only the fourth recovered meteorite fall in Arizona.”

Garvie said the first piece was discovered June 22. About every few hours for the next four days, searchers found new pieces of the fallen asteroid, he said.

Although the recent search unearthed more than a dozen meteorite fragments, the recent discoveries marked just the beginning of the search effort, Garvie said.

My Turn: What scientists need to save the planet from asteroids

“What we did for those four days was a reconnaissance mission just to say, ‘Hey, can we find any meteorites?’” he said. “We are planning at least one more trip to better define where meteorites have fallen and to collect more.

“The more we collect, the more there will be available for public to see, and the more there will be for scientific research.”

Originally, Arizona Geological Survey’s seismic network picked up an impact near Payson, more than 100 miles from the Fort Apache Reservation; however, Garvie said that none of the pieces found by the ASU team could have come from the Payson area.

So far, analysis has shown that the meteorite pieces are more than 4.5 billion years old and are identified as ordinary chondrite, pieces from one of the most common classes of meteorite, Garvie said.

Search efforts involved teamwork

Garvie plans to provide more information from his research  as he begins a deeper analysis of the meteorites.

He also spoke about the joint effort of the ASU team, the tribe and three volunteers he referred to as “ASU invitees.”

The “invitees” donated their time and research to the search efforts but agreed with the team that the pieces would remain within ASU’s care.

Garvie mentioned that one of the most essential people involved was Jacob Moore, the assistant vice president of tribal relations at ASU.

Moore worked as the direct link between the tribe and the university — ultimately gaining the team access to lands that held the meteorites that otherwise would have been off-limits.

“In a sense, he was the most important person in all of this,” he said. “Without him and his dedication and time, I don’t think this would have ever happened.”

A small asteroid shatters the dark

The boom and flash of light that broke the predawn quiet and lit up the sky early June 2 was confirmed by NASA officials to be a small asteroid, about 10 feet in diameter, that had entered the Earth's atmosphere above Arizona.

Scientists estimated that the object was moving at more than 40,000 mph when it sped across the Arizona sky shortly before 4 a.m.

More than 140 people reported the “bright fireball” that illuminated the sky around 3:57 a.m. June 2 to the American Meteor Society, a spokesman said. Very bright meteors, also referred to as “fireballs,” occur quite frequently over oceans and inhabited areas but are usually not visible in daylight, the society said.

Dust and meteorites fall to Earth's surface daily, according to the NASA statement, with between 80 and 100 tons of material entering the atmosphere each day.

The ASU team had six members 

• Laurence Garvie, ASU curator for the Center for Meteorite Studies.
• Prajkta Mane, ASU graduate student for the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
• Daniel Dunlap, ASU graduate student for the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
• Robert Ward, ASU invitee and private meteorite hunter.
• Mike Miller, ASU invitee and private meteorite hunter.
• Ruben Garcia, ASU invitee and private meteorite hunter.

Asteroid vs. meteor: What's the difference?

Livescience.com explains many of the details on its website, as does the American Meteor Society. Here are some of the extraterrestrial basics from those two sources:

Asteroid: An asteroid is a rocky object in space that's smaller than a planet. There are millions of asteroids orbiting the sun, some 750,000 of which are found in the Asteroid Belt, a vast ring of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Meteoroid: A general term describing small particles of comets or asteroids that are in orbit around the sun. There's no universally accepted definition (based on size or any other characteristic) that distinguishes a meteoroid from an asteroid — they're simply smaller than asteroids. If remnants of the parent meteoroid survive the trip through the atmosphere to reach the ground, then these remnants are called meteorites.

Meteor: A meteor is an asteroid or meteoroid or other object that burns and vaporizes upon entry into the Earth's atmosphere; meteors are commonly known as "shooting stars."  A meteoroid that plows into the Earth’s atmosphere will create a brief flash of moving light in the sky.

Meteorite: If a meteor survives the plunge through the atmosphere and lands on the Earth's surface, it's known as a meteorite.

Fireball: A fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky.