Days after a huge fireball tore through the skies over New Zealand last month, Steve Wyn-Harris spotted a small black rock on the bare ground. The citizen astronomer was looking for remains of the meteor that had flown over the North Island. He bagged the rock but wasn’t too sure, as he says most finds turn out to be “wrong meteorites.” But when he held the thumb-sized rock next to a refrigerator magnet, to detect iron and nickel in meteorites, it clicked. Wyn-Harris did the test on a video call with other citizen scientists and geologists and after the click “we were all screaming.” “I went from doubting Thomas to converting,” Wyn-Harris says. Steve Wyn-Harris searching for fragments of the July meteor. Photo: Provided by Fireballs Aotearoa Its discovery marks the 11th confirmed meteorite found in New Zealand. Meteorites are the remains of rock that hit the ground after the meteor burned up upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Finding debris in New Zealand can be difficult, as a result of the country’s rugged and sparsely populated terrain. Wyn-Harris is the director of Fireballs Aotearoa, an alliance of astronomers, geologists and citizen scientists that now has a network of 200 cameras installed across the country designed to help document meteor showers and recover meteorites. On July 28, the group and their cameras had tracked a meteor over the North Island, and people had rushed online to describe it. The dazzling display and a “big bang.” The images indicated that there was an exciting possibility that many fragments of the meteor would fall to the ground. After analyzing data, including wind speed and flight path projections, the group zeroed in on an area where they estimated meteorites might be scattered. They kept the location secret, worried that a public plea for help could trigger a “meteor avalanche” (a Martian meteorite found in Niger sold for more than $5 million last year), although New Zealand law prohibits such sales. Wyn-Harris says he found the meteorite near a riverbank while exploring farmland a day before he and the group were supposed to search the area. minutes,” he says. But on the video call later that night, a geologist looked at the rock and noticed its crust had a meteorite quality. The next day, a team of 11 carried out a broader search of the area. PhD student Liam McGovern with one of four fragments found by Fireballs Aotearoa after a meteor hit New Zealand on July 28. Photograph: Provided by Fireballs Aotearoa Two days after the discovery of Wyn-Harris, weighing eight grams, Liam McGovern, a PhD student in geology, found a second fragment, weighing 39 grams. Over 10 days, the search party discovered four pieces, weighing a total of 75 grams, including a fragment that had crashed into the driveway of a house. Wyn-Harris says the meteor’s trajectory before entering the atmosphere indicated that it came from the asteroid belt, making it an “ordinary chondrite.” The name is “unfortunate, because they are not common”, he says. The four fragments will now be further analyzed by Dr Marshall Palmer, a geologist who is part of Fireballs Aotearoa. Palmer will give the meteorites an official name and, together, they will become the 11th documented meteorite from New Zealand Professor James Scott, geoscientist and founder of Fireballs Aotearoa, says the pieces are “100%” meteorites and believes they are likely to share. origins with the first New Zealand meteorite discovered in 1863 near Masterton. “That blows my mind. “We have two rocks, formed elsewhere in space from a small asteroid… that has been catastrophically destroyed, and yet they land within 10 kilometers of each other.”
