Rocks

Rocks

Crater, impact crater

It's that meteor.

This is one very large crater. Geologists love craters, because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it, and you can see what's below the surface.

In Meteor Crater it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground.

It's no meteor. That's for sure.

The main mass of infalling matter on Earth is related to rare meteorite classes (CM and CR carbonaceous chondrites) but has mineralogical and bulk chemical features of its own.

The very unusual Kaidun chondrite is a chondrite breccia consisting of a variety of highly oxidized and highly reduced lithologies.

What about these meteor machines?

Some of them are smaller.

As I told you, geologists love craters.

There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called Meteor Crater.

They've located that second meteor.

In spite of the concentration of its resources on the study of cosmic dust (micrometeorites), the Department was able to investigate a large spectrum of meteoritic or planetary subjects.

Meteorites delivered chemistry, and perhaps membranes, too.

Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992.

The needle isn't pointing north. It's pointing toward the meteor.

And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in.

And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites.

The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock, and that's much more crumbly, so it blew up in the air. Either way, these are tremendous explosions, 20 megatons.

The result of this work showed that Antarctic micrometeorites are a separate class of extraterrestrial material, with properties that are different from those of known meteorite classes and interplanetary dust particles.

Thus, the interplanetary dust is not represented by any of the meteorites in our collections and in all likelihood micrometeorites represent the silicate portion of comets.There is still no consensus on the origin of these crystalline melt droplets after which the most common meteorites, the chondrites, are named.

There must have been another cylinder down here. They cleared everyone out.

That meteor is either very light, which is unheard of, or it's hollow.

A cylinder reported by Huntington Beach. That's a job for the Navy.

This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts.

It turns out that these things don't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage.

Now, when these things blow up, they're not going to do global ecological damage.

Why didn't it make a bigger crater?

We're trying to locate the second meteor that landed here at midnight.

Also studied were the isotopic composition of various tektites (rare natural glasses that form in meteorite impacts).

From a meteorite from space, we re over here with an original Sputnik.

The energy from one square dance could send the meteor back home.

The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Mackey Auditorium here.

Now this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in.

So, this is called Victoria Crater, which is about a few football fields in size.

Risks are posed by radiation, by natural meteoroids and debris from human space activities.

It demonstrates mixing of lithologies from very different regions of the solar nebula.

Now, this is not a 200 mile wide crater, but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage.

Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth.

If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic.

We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left.

And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.

New lunar meteorites recovered from Antarctica were analysed in collaboration with the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.