"We got there by the skin of our
teeth," geologist Phil Bland said
A team of Australian geologists have unearthed a 4.5
billion-year-old meteorite that appears to have traveled from farther away than
Mars, retrieving it just hours before heavy rainfall would have washed it away.
The 3.7-lb. (1.7 kg) meteorite plunged to Earth in
late November, and the team from Curtin University had been working to find it
ever since, the university said. By New Year’s Eve, the team had tracked the
meteorite to a remote spot on Lake Eyre in the Australian Outback, where
geologist Phil Bland, a professor and the team’s leader, dug it out by hand as
a storm approached.
“It was an amazing effort,” Bland said in a press
release from the university. “We got there by the skin of our teeth.”
The meteorite is the first recovered with help from the
Desert Fireball Network, a new series of 32 camera observatories across the
Outback. It is thought to be from the early formation of the solar system,
“older than Earth itself,” Bland said, according to ABC News in Australia. ABC
reports the rock appears to have come from beyond Mars’ orbit.
“This recovery will be the first of many,” Bland
said, “and every one of those meteorites will give us a unique window into the
formation of the solar system.”
Source : time.com