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Meteorite hunters headed into the Sierra Nevada foothills this week to find fragments of the space rock that jolted many California and Nevada residents Sunday morning. Experts say Tuolumne and Calaveras county residents hoping to take home an intergalactic souvenir will need to travel farther north. Bill Cooke, a specialist in meteors with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said on Thursday that anyone looking for pieces of the remains in this area aren’t going to have much luck. “You’re not going to find any particles,” Cooke said.
The minivan-sized meteor caused a stir around 8 a.m. Sunday, traveling 33,000 mph through the atmosphere and setting off a sonic boom. Thousands of people in Central California and Nevada heard the noise and saw the fireball streaking across the sky. Scientists have said the meteor likely broke up about 5 miles above the south shore of Turlock Lake with about one-third the explosive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. So far, multiple fragments have been found near Coloma, a Gold Rush town north of Placerville. Cooke said Doppler weather radar caught fragments falling in the area, tipping off meteorite hunters and scientists looking to recover them. He estimated the “fall zone” for the fragments to be approximately eight miles long and three miles wide in that area. Scientists believe the meteorite is a rare type known as “CM,” or carbonaceous chondrite, a type of meteorite that has a lot of value, both scientific and monetary. “I think you’ve got every meteorite hunter in the country converging up there,” he said. “You’ve got a second gold rush going on.” Don Yeomans, of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, told the Associated Press this type of meteorite is one of the more primitive types of space rocks out there, dating to the origin of the solar system 4 billion to 5 billion years ago. Yeomens said it’s got two of the most important chemicals that scientists look for: carbon and a form of water. So far, at least two searchers have walked away with a prize. Peter Jenniskens, a scientist with NASA and the SETI Institute, found a four-gram fragment in a parking lot of a park on the American River. Amateur meteorite hunter Robert Ward, of Arizona, found a piece along a road near Lotus. Ward, who has found meteorites in every continent but Antarctica and goes by “AstroBob” on his website, told the Associated Press that his only previous finds rivaling this were three lunar meteorites he found years ago in the Middle East. “It was just, needless to say, a thrilling moment,” Ward said on Wednesday. Some local residents are still interested in the search, even if it’s at a distance. Jeff Tolhurst, an earth science professor at Columbia College, said the college is still abuzz with talk of the meteor. He said students have been posting about the possible meteorite fragments on a college Facebook page. “Everyone at the college has been talking about it,” he said. Tolhurst said he remembers a group of former students found a meteorite in the Emigrant Wilderness a few years ago. After a similar fireball during the summer, they ran into a meteorite hunter who was in town and hiked to the apparent fall zone, Tolhurst said. They found a piece of “burned rock” on the hike and sold it to the meteorite collector. “They found the only piece,” he said. “They got the chemical printout. It turned out to be a bona-fide meteorite.” La Grange resident Rich Deickmann lives near the location where the meteor exploded in the sky, though he did not hear the commotion on Sunday. Despite the talk of space rocks, he said he hasn’t looked around his property for meteorite fragments. But Deickmann said on Thursday he’s interested in knowing more about the fragments, what they look like and other properties. “It would be quite a thing to find,” he said. Locals still have something of value related to the fireball that they can possibly contribute — information. NASA and the SETI Institute are looking for video, photographs or eyewitness accounts of the morning meteor. According to an announcement from NASA, the data could help scientists better analyze its trajectory of the meteor and learn about its orbit, as well as help scientists locate the path and find places where other fragments may have fallen. Cooke said the fragments themselves will continue to have a lot of value for researchers, despite the fact that rainy weather can negatively affect the material in the fragment. But he also said scientists can sometimes continue collecting information and data for months to fully study events like Sunday’s. Cooke, himself, recently talked to a cabin owner near Kyburz who gave a surprisingly accurate eyewitness account of the meteor and who claims he saw it actually break apart. “I liked his account,” Cooke said. |