Scientists Wish Upon Shooting Star, Find Super Rare Meteorites

The asteroid spotted entering Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in October was believed to have fully disintegrated, but scientists recovered hundreds of pieces of the space rock, which are unlike anything found on Earth before.

An international team found almost 280 bits of meteorite in a 11 square-mile section of Sudan's Nubian Desert, the largest of which was the size of an egg. Lab analysis showed that the rocks belong to a rare class of asteroids that has never before been sampled in such a pristine state and could fill some gaps in our understanding of the solar system's early history.

"It's the first time we've been able to track something through the air and watch it fly apart and then find pieces of it," microbial ecologist Rocco Mancinelli of SETI, a co-author of a study on the meteorite pieces Wednesday in Nature, told Wired.com.

Scientists use asteroids to learn about the early solar system because they are among the oldest objects in the universe and can remained relatively unchanged from when they formed, providing a historical snapshot. It is estimated that hundreds of meteorites fall to Earth each year, but only a few end up in the hands of scientists.

Because asteroids are typically surrounded by a shroud of dust as they travel through space, they reflect light differently in flight than they do in the lab, making it difficult to connect meteorites found on Earth with particular types of asteroids. But because the car-sized Sudan asteroid was spotted 20 hours beforeit hit Earth's atmosphere, scientists were able to determine that it was an unusual type of asteroid that falls between the two most common types.

For the first time, scientists can begin to connect the light signatures of asteroids in space to signatures of meteorites in the lab.

"This is like the first step toward a Rosetta Stone for classifyingasteroids," cosmic mineralogist Michael Zolensky at NASA's JohnsonSpace Center in Houston, a co-author on the study, said in a press conference Wednesday.

The team, led by SETI astronomer Peter Jenniskens, hopes the intermediate meteorites will reveal details about how planets formed in the early solar system.

"It gives a window on the past," Jenniskens told Wired.com. "You see a little piece of early history coming into focus."

The Sudan meteorites are from a rare class of asteroids known as ureilites, which contain a lot of carbon, much of it in the form of graphite, as well as diamonds produced by shock. The Sudan specimens show evidence of volcanic activity, which means they came from a parent body that was almost big enough to call a planet.

"It's showing us that this asteroid had planet-like activity on it," said astronomer Lucy McFadden of the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study. "We're lucky that the earth was in the right place and placed itself in front of this new meteorite."

But that planet shut down, lost its heat source an