What was the Winchcombe meteorite?
Winchcombe is a rare carbonaceous chondrite that fell in Gloucestershire, England, on 28 February 2021. Recovered within hours and barely touched by Earth's environment, it is one of the most pristine meteorites ever studied.
At about 9.54 pm on 28 February 2021, a brilliant fireball streaked across the sky over England and was recorded by doorbell cameras and by cameras of the UK Fireball Alliance. The footage let scientists work out its path, its likely landing zone around the Cotswold town of Winchcombe, and even its orbit, showing that it came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The next morning, a family in Winchcombe found a pile of black, sooty fragments on their driveway, which had shattered on landing and scattered across the tarmac and lawn. They gathered the pieces with care, and scientists were soon able to place them in a protected environment within about 12 hours of the fall. In the days that followed, a search team found a 152 g stone on farmland nearby. Altogether about 600 g was recovered.
Winchcombe is a CM2 carbonaceous chondrite, the first meteorite of its kind found in the UK and the first British fall recovered for 30 years. Carbonaceous chondrites are among the most primitive rocks in the Solar System. They contain water locked into clay minerals and a rich mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids. Because the stones were collected so quickly, they had very little time to pick up water or contamination from Earth, making them as close to a sample-return mission as a falling rock can be.
Researchers have compared Winchcombe with samples brought back from the asteroid Ryugu by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft, and studies suggest the water in it is chemically similar to Earth's oceans, supporting the idea that asteroids helped bring water to our planet.