Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies

The first asteroid to be discovered in 2014 appears to have broken up over the Atlantic Ocean, according to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office.  Entering Earth's atmosphere in the early hours of January 1, 2014, this small asteroid, labeled 2014 AA, was first identified by researchers at the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona. …

2013   Season's Greetings   from the   Center for Meteorite Studies   About 300 years ago, a 3,500 tonne iron meteorite slammed into the desert of Saudi Arabia, instantly melting the sand and forming craters up to 100 m in diameter.  The craters are surrounded by impact glass, such as the one pictured, which…

11 Dec 2013 Residents of Tucson, AZ were startled by a sonic boom Tuesday evening!  The event was captured on video, and coincided with the beginning of this year's Geminid meteor shower. Unlike most other meteor showers, the Geminid meteor shower is unique in that the particles that create the telltale streaks across the sky during…

Losttown is an iron meteorite (IID) found in Georgia, in 1868. This specimen exhibits excellent Widmanstätten pattern (named for Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten, director of the Austrian Imperial Porcelain Works, in 1808), created by the interlocking crystal structure of two nickel-iron alloys.  Most iron meteorites are believed to originate in the cores of large…

A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal provides details on a unique asteroid with multiple comet-like tails!  While comets originate in the Kuiper Belt or Oort cloud, however, this object orbits at the inner edge of the asteroid belt. This extraordinary space object, dubbed P/2013 P5, was observed using the Hubble Space Telescope and…