Forged at the dawn of the solar system, a fist-sized meteorite has ended its millions-mile journey, safe and secure, in the hands of Mountain View scientists.
An analysis of the glass-crusted black rock and its 600 siblings is revealing, for the first time, the life and death of meteors that streak across our nighttime skies.
“It’s like a little window into the earliest times of our solar system … before there was such a thing as Earth,” said meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center, who led the study published Aug. 8 in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
