People of meteoritics
120 people who made the science of meteorites: the scientists who proved that stones fall from the sky, the curators who built the great collections, the hunters who search deserts and ice, and the eyewitnesses who saw a meteorite land. Every life is told in plain English, and the timeline shows where each one fits.
Scientists 73
The researchers who proved that stones fall from the sky, worked out what meteorites are made of, and read the history of the Solar System from them.
Carl Agee
The New Mexico scientist who led the 2013 study of Black Beauty, a Martian breccia full of water-bearing minerals and ancient crust.
American · 1911–1988Luis Alvarez
The Nobel prize-winning physicist who, with his son Walter, proposed in 1980 that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs.
American · born 1940Walter Alvarez
The geologist who found the iridium-rich clay at Gubbio and, with his father Luis, linked the end of the dinosaurs to an impact.
Latvian-born American · 1926–2025Edward Anders
The Chicago cosmochemist whose table of Solar System element abundances became a standard, and whose team first found stardust older than the Sun in meteorites.
American · 1912–2010Ralph Baldwin
The astronomer who made the case in 1949, in The Face of the Moon, that the Moon's craters were blasted out by impacts.
American · born 1958Richard Binzel
The MIT astronomer who found the family of small asteroids broken off Vesta and created the Torino scale for impact risk.
French · 1774–1862Jean-Baptiste Biot
The young physicist whose report on the 1803 fall at L'Aigle convinced the scientific world that meteorites come from the sky.
BritishPhilip Bland
The planetary scientist who built the Desert Fireball Network across the Australian outback and recovered the Murrili meteorite from a salt lake in 2016.
AmericanDonald Bogard
The NASA scientist who found Martian air trapped in a meteorite in 1983, proving that some meteorites come from Mars.
French · 1751–1825Jacques-Louis de Bournon
The French mineralogist who described the round grains and metal in fallen stones alongside Edward Howard in 1802.
American · 1917–1986Harrison Brown
The geochemist who saw that meteorites could reveal the age of the Earth, and set his student Clair Patterson on the task.
CanadianPeter Brown
The Western University scientist who uses cameras, radar and infrasound to track fireballs and work out where meteorites come from.
American · born 1943Donald Brownlee
The astronomer who first collected dust from comets and asteroids in the stratosphere, and who led NASA's Stardust mission to a comet.
Danish · 1929–2025Vagn Buchwald
The Danish metallurgist whose three-volume handbook described almost every iron meteorite known, and who recovered the Agpalilik iron from Greenland.
Czech · 1929–2009Zdeněk Ceplecha
The Czech astronomer who calculated the first orbit of a meteorite from photographs, after the Příbram fall of 1959.
Chinese-born American · 1919–2008Edward Chao
The mineralogist who found coesite at Meteor Crater in 1960, the first proof that a crater on Earth was made by an impact.
German · 1756–1827Ernst Chladni
The physicist who argued in 1794 that stones and lumps of iron really do fall from space, when almost no scientist believed it.
Canadian-born American · 1930–2017Robert Clayton
The chemist who discovered that oxygen isotopes give every meteorite group its own fingerprint, the key to telling where meteorites come from.
BritishLuke Daly
The Glasgow planetary geologist who helped organise the search that recovered most of the Winchcombe meteorite in 2021.
American · 1914–1995Robert Dietz
The geologist who showed that shatter cones are fingerprints of impacts, and who argued that Sudbury in Canada is a giant impact structure.
American · 1843–1918Grove Karl Gilbert
The great American geologist who argued that the Moon's craters were made by impacts, yet concluded that Meteor Crater was not.
British · born 1958Monica Grady
The British planetary scientist who curated meteorites at the Natural History Museum, edited the world catalogue and worked on the Rosetta comet mission.
Canadian · 1928–2018Ian Halliday
The Canadian astronomer who built a network of fireball cameras across the prairies and recovered the Innisfree meteorite in 1977.
German-born British · 1738–1822William Herschel
The astronomer who discovered Uranus and in 1802 coined the word asteroid for the small bodies found between Mars and Jupiter.
Canadian · born 1955Alan Hildebrand
The Canadian scientist who, in 1991, identified the buried Chicxulub crater in Mexico as the impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs.
British · 1774–1816Edward Howard
The English chemist who found nickel in fallen stones in 1802, and after whom the howardite meteorites are named.
Japanese · born 1955Junichiro Kawaguchi
The Japanese engineer who led the Hayabusa mission, which nursed a crippled spacecraft home with the first grains from an asteroid.
German-born American · 1934–2022Klaus Keil
The pioneer of the electron microprobe in meteorite science, who helped show that ordinary chondrites form three distinct groups.
BritishAshley King
The Natural History Museum scientist who collected the Winchcombe meteorite from a family's driveway in 2021 and helped lead its study.
British · c. 1735–1807Edward King
An English antiquary whose 1796 pamphlet was the first book in Britain to take reports of stones from the sky seriously.
American · 1814–1895Daniel Kirkwood
The astronomer who discovered in 1866 the gaps in the asteroid belt made by Jupiter's gravity, now called the Kirkwood gaps.
Russian · 1906–1984Evgeny Krinov
The Soviet meteorite scientist who studied Tunguska with Kulik and led the field study of the 1947 Sikhote-Alin iron shower.
American · 1897–1985Lincoln LaPaz
The director of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico, who tracked fireballs from eyewitness reports and recovered the giant Norton County stone.
American · born 1970Dante Lauretta
The University of Arizona scientist who led OSIRIS-REx, the mission that brought about 120 grams of the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in 2023.
French · 1743–1794Antoine Lavoisier
The founder of modern chemistry, who was among the French academicians who decided that a stone seen to fall in 1768 was an ordinary rock struck by lightning.
American · 1896–1960Frederick Leonard
The astronomer who co-founded the Meteoritical Society in 1933 and built the meteorite collection at the University of California, Los Angeles.
American · 1921–2018Ursula Marvin
The Smithsonian geologist who studied Moon rocks and meteorites, searched the Antarctic ice for ANSMET and wrote the history of meteoritics.
American · 1923–2004Toshiko Mayeda
The chemist who, with Robert Clayton, measured the oxygen isotopes of meteorites from every part of the Solar System.
AmericanThomas McCord
The planetary scientist who showed in 1970 that the asteroid Vesta has the same colours as basaltic meteorites, and later worked on the Dawn mission.
American · 1924–2012Richard McCrosky
The Harvard and Smithsonian astronomer who ran the Prairie Network of fireball cameras, which tracked the Lost City meteorite in 1970.
American · 1936–2013David McKay
The NASA scientist who led the 1996 study suggesting that the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 might hold traces of ancient life.
American · born 1945Harry McSween
The planetary geologist who helped prove that the SNC meteorites come from Mars and wrote widely read books on meteorites and their parent worlds.
French · 1852–1907Henri Moissan
The Nobel prize-winning French chemist who found silicon carbide in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a mineral now called moissanite.
American · 1872–1952Forest Ray Moulton
The astronomer whose calculation in 1929 showed that the meteorite that made Meteor Crater must have been largely vaporised.
American · 1830–1896Hubert Anson Newton
The Yale mathematician who traced the Leonid meteor storms back a thousand years and predicted their return in 1866.
German · 1758–1840Heinrich Olbers
The Bremen doctor and astronomer who discovered the asteroids Pallas in 1802 and Vesta in 1807.
American · 1791–1859Denison Olmsted
The Yale professor who studied the great Leonid meteor storm of 1833 and showed that meteors come from space.
Estonian · 1893–1985Ernst Öpik
The Estonian astronomer who studied meteors for half a century, predicted that comets come from a vast distant cloud, and worked at Armagh in Northern Ireland.
German · 1741–1811Peter Simon Pallas
The naturalist who brought a giant mass of iron and olivine from Siberia to St Petersburg, the first pallasite known to science.
American · 1922–1995Clair Patterson
The geochemist who used lead from meteorites to measure the age of the Earth, 4.55 billion years, in 1956.
AmericanGlen Penfield
The oil company geophysicist who found a giant buried ring under Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in 1978, later shown to be the Chicxulub crater.
Italian · 1746–1826Giuseppe Piazzi
The astronomer in Palermo who discovered Ceres, the first known asteroid, on the first night of the nineteenth century.
British · 1943–2014Colin Pillinger
The Open University scientist who studied carbon in meteorites and led Beagle 2, Britain's lander for Mars.
American · born 1943Christopher Russell
The UCLA scientist who led NASA's Dawn mission, which orbited Vesta and Ceres and confirmed that the HED meteorites come from Vesta.
Italian · 1835–1910Giovanni Schiaparelli
The Milan astronomer who showed in 1866 that the Perseid meteors follow the orbit of a comet.
American · born 1935Harrison Schmitt
The only professional geologist to walk on the Moon, who collected rock samples on Apollo 17 in December 1972.
American · 1928–1997Eugene Shoemaker
The founder of planetary geology, who proved Meteor Crater was an impact and co-discovered the comet that hit Jupiter.
American · 1779–1864Benjamin Silliman
The Yale chemist who investigated the 1807 Weston fall in Connecticut, the first recorded meteorite fall in the United States.
British · 1826–1908Henry Clifton Sorby
The Sheffield scientist who invented the study of rocks in thin slices and described chondrules as frozen drops of fiery rain.
CzechPavel Spurný
The Czech fireball expert whose camera networks traced the Neuschwanstein meteorite and many other falls to the ground.
Austrian-born American · 1909–1993Hans Suess
The chemist who in 1956, with Harold Urey, drew up the first reliable table of how common each element is in the Solar System.
British · c. 1760–1806William Thomson
The English mineralogist in Naples who first saw the crystal pattern inside an iron meteorite, in 1804.
Italian · 1722–1792Domenico Troili
The Jesuit who described the 1766 fall at Albareto in Italy, and after whom the meteorite mineral troilite is named.
Austrian · 1836–1927Gustav Tschermak
The Vienna mineralogist who named maskelynite, the shocked glass in the Shergotty meteorite, and helped classify meteorites.
American · 1893–1981Harold Urey
The Nobel prize-winning chemist who helped found cosmochemistry, the study of the chemistry of the Solar System.
American · 1927–2016Gerald Wasserburg
The Caltech geochemist whose super-clean laboratory dated Moon rocks and found the traces of aluminium-26 in the Allende meteorite.
American · 1934–2020John Wasson
The UCLA chemist who sorted iron meteorites into chemical groups using nickel, gallium, germanium and iridium.
German · 1880–1930Alfred Wegener
The scientist best known for continental drift, who also argued in 1921 that the Moon's craters were made by impacts.
Canadian-born American · 1944–2001Ian Whillans
The glaciologist who explained how Antarctic ice gathers meteorites, and who co-found the first meteorite recognised from the Moon.
American · 1906–2004Fred Whipple
The Harvard astronomer who described comets as dirty snowballs and pioneered measuring meteor orbits from photographs.
Austrian · 1754–1849Alois von Beckh-Widmanstätten
The Viennese scientist whose name was given to the criss-cross crystal pattern seen inside iron meteorites.
American · born 1932John Wood
The planetary scientist who co-created the petrologic types of chondrites and first proposed that the young Moon was covered in a magma ocean.
Austrian-born American · 1937–2015Ernst Zinner
The physicist who measured single grains of stardust inside meteorites, showing which kinds of stars made them.
Curators and collection builders 15
The people who gathered, catalogued and cared for the great meteorite collections, so that every scientist could study them.
Aristides Brezina
The Vienna curator whose detailed classification of meteorites was used around the world for more than half a century.
AmericanRoy Clarke
The Smithsonian curator who helped collect and describe the Allende meteorite in 1969 and co-discovered the mineral tetrataenite.
British · 1854–1921Lazarus Fletcher
The Natural History Museum mineralogist whose clear introduction to meteorites taught the public for decades.
American · 1846–1895Albert Foote
The Philadelphia mineral dealer who in 1891 first described the iron meteorites around Meteor Crater and the diamonds inside them.
British · 1938–2007Robert Hutchison
The Natural History Museum curator who wrote a standard textbook on meteorites and helped compile the world catalogue of meteorites.
American · 1935–1998Elbert King
The first curator of the Apollo Moon rocks, who helped design how they were received and protected on Earth.
American · 1856–1932George Kunz
The Tiffany gem expert who traded and studied meteorites, bought pieces of Brenham and named the mineral moissanite.
New Zealand-born American · 1917–2009Brian Mason
The Smithsonian curator who classified thousands of Antarctic meteorites and spotted that the first lunar meteorite looked like Apollo highland rock.
American · 1897–1999Oscar Monnig
The Texas businessman and amateur astronomer who built one of the finest private meteorite collections and gave it to a university.
AmericanEdward Olsen
The Field Museum curator who joined William Cassidy on the first American meteorite search in Antarctica in 1976.
German · 1798–1873Gustav Rose
The Berlin mineralogist who sorted meteorites into families in 1863 and coined the names chondrite and howardite.
Austrian · 1775–1852Carl von Schreibers
The director of the imperial natural history collections in Vienna, who built one of the world's first great meteorite collections.
British · 1823–1911Nevil Story-Maskelyne
The keeper of minerals at the British Museum who built up its meteorite collection and gave his name to maskelynite.
American · 1834–1906Henry Ward
The naturalist from Rochester, New York, who supplied museums worldwide and built one of the largest private meteorite collections of his age.
AmericanMichael Zolensky
The NASA curator of cosmic dust who found liquid water from an asteroid inside salt crystals in the Monahans meteorite.
Hunters and explorers 21
Field searchers who walked deserts, ice sheets and farmland to bring meteorites in from the wild.
Steve Arnold
The American meteorite hunter who dug up a 650-kilogram pallasite at Brenham, Kansas, in 2005.
American · 1860–1929Daniel Moreau Barringer
The mining engineer who spent 26 years and a fortune trying to prove, correctly, that Meteor Crater was made by a falling meteorite.
American · 1928–2020William Cassidy
The geologist who founded ANSMET, the American programme that has brought more than 20,000 meteorites in from the Antarctic ice.
AmericanRobert Haag
The Arizona meteorite hunter and dealer who travelled the world in search of fresh falls from the 1970s onwards.
AmericanRalph Harvey
The geologist who has led ANSMET's Antarctic meteorite searches since the early 1990s.
Welsh-born AmericanEllis Hughes
The Oregon settler who secretly dragged the 15-tonne Willamette iron onto his own land in 1902, and lost it in court.
BritishMira Ihasz
The volunteer who found the largest piece of the Winchcombe meteorite in a sheep field in March 2021.
Dutch-born American · born 1962Peter Jenniskens
The meteor astronomer who led the desert search that found the first meteorites from an asteroid tracked in space before impact.
American · c. 1849–1933Eliza Kimberly
The Kansas farmer's wife who gathered heavy black stones from her family's fields and proved that they were pallasite meteorites.
AmericanRichard Kowalski
The Catalina Sky Survey astronomer who discovered 2008 TC3, the first asteroid ever found before it hit the Earth.
Russian · 1883–1942Leonid Kulik
The Soviet mineralogist who led the first expeditions to the site of the 1908 Tunguska explosion.
JapaneseRenji Naruse
The Japanese glaciologist who found the first meteorite on the Yamato ice field in December 1969, opening up Antarctica's meteorite treasure.
American · 1887–1986Harvey Nininger
The schoolteacher who became the greatest meteorite hunter of the twentieth century, finding hundreds of new meteorites across the American plains.
American · 1856–1920Robert Peary
The Arctic explorer who took the great Cape York iron meteorites from Greenland to New York in the 1890s.
British · 1885–1960Harry St John Philby
The explorer who crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter in 1932 and found the Wabar craters and their iron meteorites.
HungarianKrisztián Sárneczky
The Hungarian astronomer who discovered three small asteroids hours before they struck the Earth, including one that fell near Berlin in 2024.
AmericanJohn Schutt
The ANSMET mountaineer who, with Ian Whillans, found the first meteorite recognised as coming from the Moon, in January 1982.
AmericanRoberta Score
The NASA laboratory manager who picked up ALH 84001 on the Antarctic ice in December 1984, the most famous Martian meteorite of all.
SudaneseMuawia Shaddad
The University of Khartoum astronomer who led students across the Nubian Desert to recover Almahata Sitta in 2008.
American · 1929–2021Carolyn Shoemaker
The astronomer who began searching the sky in her fifties and discovered more comets than almost anyone, including the one that hit Jupiter.
Japanese · 1941–2018Keizo Yanai
The Japanese geologist who collected thousands of Antarctic meteorites and helped start the joint search that grew into ANSMET.
Eyewitnesses and finders 11
Ordinary people who saw a meteorite fall, were nearly hit by one, or turned one up with a plough.
Jacobus Hermanus Brits
The farmer whose plough struck the Hoba iron in 1920, the largest single meteorite known.
BritishThe Wilcock family
The Gloucestershire family who found black fragments of the Winchcombe meteorite on their driveway the morning after it fell in 2021.
CanadianRuth Hamilton
The woman in Golden, British Columbia, who woke in 2021 to find a meteorite had landed on her pillow beside her head.
American · 1920–1972Ann Hodges
The Alabama woman who in 1954 became the first well-documented person injured by a meteorite.
AmericanMichelle Knapp
The 18-year-old from Peekskill, New York, whose car was hit by a 12-kilogram meteorite in October 1992.
AmericanEdward McCain
The man from Benld, Illinois, whose car was pierced from roof to floor by a falling meteorite in 1938.
AmericanJulius McKinney
The Alabama farmer who found the second piece of the Sylacauga meteorite the day after it hit Ann Hodges, and was able to sell it.
RussianPyotr Medvedev
The painter who watched the 1947 Sikhote-Alin fireball from his window and sketched it as it happened.
BritishArthur Pettifor
The Cambridgeshire man who heard a meteorite crash through his garden hedge in 1991 and found it still warm.
BritishJohn Shipley
The Yorkshire farm worker who was only metres away when the Wold Cottage meteorite landed in December 1795.
British · 1751–1820Edward Topham
The owner of Wold Cottage in Yorkshire, where a 25 kg stone fell in 1795, who put it on show in London and built a monument where it landed.
No one matches that search.