Ashley King
The Natural History Museum scientist who collected the Winchcombe meteorite from a family's driveway in 2021 and helped lead its study.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Planetary scientist
Ashley King is a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London who studies carbonaceous chondrites, the meteorites that carry water-bearing minerals and organic molecules. He has worked on samples from the asteroid Ryugu brought back by Hayabusa2, and on how water changed the rock inside early asteroids.
On 1 March 2021, the morning after the Winchcombe fireball, the Wilcock family in Gloucestershire reported dark stones on their driveway. King travelled to Winchcombe and collected the pieces, about 300 grams in all. As soon as he saw them, he recognised that they were a carbonaceous chondrite, a type never before recovered from a fall in Britain.
To keep the fragments as pristine as possible, they were sealed and stored in clean conditions. A search team of volunteers and researchers then walked fields along the predicted fall line, and the largest single piece, of about 152 grams, was found in a sheep field a few days later. In all, around 600 grams were recovered.
King helped lead the international study that followed. It showed that Winchcombe is a CM chondrite, a breccia of different fragments, and that its orbit came from the outer asteroid belt. The analysis found water whose hydrogen isotopes closely resemble those of Earth's oceans, adding to the evidence that asteroids helped deliver water to the young Earth.
On the timeline
- 28 February 2021Winchcombe: a meteorite on a driveway