2023-05-30 16:00:13
“It was an asteroid 1 meter in diameter and regarding 1 ton seen more than 200,000 kilometers from Earth. And, seventy-two hours later, we had a piece of it in our hands., says, still very moved, Brigitte Zanda, three and a half months following this discovery. The teacher-researcher at the National Museum of Natural History was only at the beginning of the adventure.
For the first time in France, and only the third time in the history of science, an interplanetary object observed by astronomers was identified as heading towards Earth (the asteroid), then seen, photographed and filmed as it entered the atmosphere (the meteor), and finally found in the form of fragments (the meteorites). An exceptional sequence… and public. At the same time as the Vigie-Ciel network was mobilizing scientists and volunteers to try to find as many testimonies of this event as possible in Normandy, meteorite hunters arrived from France, Germany and Poland. A race once morest time was on.
The first 93-gram meteorite found by a student in a field in Saint-Pierre-le-Viger (Seine-Maritime), on February 15, two days following the light flash observed over the English Channel, marked the success of the program citizen sciences Fripon Vigie-Ciel. Set up since 2017 to associate researchers (Museum, Paris Observatory, Paris-Sud and Grenoble universities, etc.) and amateurs, the system includes around a hundred cameras spread over the territory in order to determine the fall zone of eventual meteorites and try to find them.
Unlike archaeological objects capable of waiting underground, meteorites can quickly degrade. “These are the only natural objects that contain metal. So they rust. You have to get them out of the ground quickly if you want to analyze their properties.”, explains Brigitte Zanda, astrophysicist and cosmochemist. The most mercantile of meteorite hunters, in picking up such a pebble of earth, therefore helps to preserve it. “They are not our enemies, we also need them, but a regulatory framework is missing, while no law says who is the owner of a meteorite found on French soil”adds the researcher.
“Catastrophic fragmentation”
It turns out that the Americans Steve Arnold and Roberto Vargas, renowned for auctioning the smallest gram of meteorite fallen from the sky, were quick to reapply. Backed by more than twenty years of experience throughout the world, they have, without doubt better than others, been able to orient their research. The ellipse drawn on the ground by the dispersion of the fragments spreads out, in fact, generally over several kilometres.
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