Timeline of meteorites
159 milestones in the story of meteorites, from iron beads in an Egyptian grave to asteroids tracked all the way to the ground. Each one links to the people, famous meteorites and craters involved.
Ancient and medieval 9
Sacred stones, meteoritic iron and the first written records of falls.
- c. 3200 BC
Iron beads from space are buried in Egypt
Small tubes of hammered iron are threaded into a necklace and buried in a grave at Gerzeh, beside the Nile. Analysis in 2013 showed the metal is nickel-rich meteoritic iron, worked some 2,000 years before people learned to smelt iron from ore.
- c. 1323 BC
Tutankhamun is buried with a meteorite dagger
The young pharaoh is laid to rest with an iron dagger tucked into his wrappings. In 2016 a chemical scan showed its blade holds about 11 per cent nickel and some cobalt, the signature of an iron meteorite.
- c. 467 BC
A great stone falls at Aegospotami
Greek writers record a large stone falling from the sky near Aegospotami in Thrace, on the shore of the Dardanelles. It is one of the earliest falls described in European writing, and visitors were still being shown the stone centuries later.
- 204 BC
Rome brings a sacred stone from the sky
During the war against Hannibal, the Romans carry the black stone of the goddess Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome. It was said to have fallen from heaven, but it has long been lost, so whether it was a meteorite is unknown.
- AD 219
An emperor parades the Stone of Emesa
The teenage emperor Elagabalus brings the black stone of the sun god of Emesa, in Syria, to Rome and builds a temple for it. Ancient writers said the stone fell from the sky, and many historians think it was a meteorite.
- 19 May 861
Nōgata: the oldest fall with a surviving stone
A stone falls in the grounds of a shrine at Nōgata in southern Japan and is kept there as a sacred object. Scientific analysis in 1979 showed it is an ordinary chondrite, making it the oldest witnessed fall from which a specimen survives.
- 7 November 1492
The thunderstone of Ensisheim
A stone of about 127 kilograms crashes into a wheat field near Ensisheim in Alsace, seen by a boy. Townspeople chip pieces off, and King Maximilian orders the rest hung in the church. About 55 kilograms remain in the town today.
- 1576
Spanish explorers reach Campo del Cielo
A Spanish expedition from Tucumán goes in search of a great mass of iron that local people had described in the Gran Chaco of northern Argentina. The explorers think it is the tip of an iron mine; it is part of the Campo del Cielo meteorite shower, which fell about 4,000 years ago.
- 10 January 1623
A stone falls at Stretchleigh in Devon
A stone weighing about 10 kilograms falls near Ermington in south Devon, seen by people nearby. It is the oldest fall in England with a written record, although the stone itself has been lost.
Stones from the sky 27
From disbelief to proof: the falls and the scientists that convinced the world.
- 26 May 1751
Hraschina: two irons fall near Zagreb
Two masses of iron, about 40 and 9 kilograms, fall near the village of Hraschina in Croatia after a fireball. Church officials take sworn statements, and the larger mass goes to the imperial collection in Vienna, where it still is.
- July 1766
Troili describes the Albareto stone
A stone falls near Albareto in northern Italy. The Jesuit Domenico Troili publishes a study of it, describing brassy grains inside that are later named troilite in his honour.
- 13 September 1768
Lucé: academicians blame lightning
A stone falls near Lucé in France. A panel of the French Academy of Sciences, including Antoine Lavoisier, examines a sample and decides it is an ordinary rock that lightning had struck and melted.
- 1772
Pallas sees the Siberian iron
The naturalist Peter Simon Pallas is shown a mass of iron filled with yellow-green crystals at Krasnoyarsk, found in 1749, and sends it to St Petersburg. It becomes the first known pallasite.
- 24 July 1790
Barbotan: a town's sworn statement is mocked
Stones fall around Barbotan in south-west France. The mayor and town council sign a statement describing the event, but a leading scientist ridicules it as a sign of how far people will believe nonsense.
- April 1794
Chladni says stones come from space
Ernst Chladni publishes a short book arguing that fireballs are bodies from space and that fallen stones and irons are their remains. Most scientists think the idea absurd.
- 16 June 1794
Stones shower down near Siena
Dozens of stones fall near Siena in Tuscany, watched by many people including English visitors. Coming less than a day after an eruption of Vesuvius, the fall is at first blamed on the volcano, even though Siena lies about 320 kilometres away.
- 13 December 1795
The Wold Cottage stone lands in Yorkshire
A stone of about 25 kilograms buries itself in a field at Wold Cottage, near Wold Newton, only metres from a farm worker. The landowner, Edward Topham, exhibits it in London and later builds a monument on the spot.
- 1796
Edward King takes the reports seriously
The antiquary Edward King publishes a pamphlet on stones said to have fallen from the clouds, gathering the Siena and Wold Cottage accounts. He accepts that the falls happened, but thinks the stones formed in the air.
- 19 December 1798
A shower of stones falls at Benares
Villagers near Benares, now Varanasi, in India see a fireball and collect fallen stones. Samples sent to London are among those Edward Howard analyses in 1802.
- 1 January 1801
Piazzi discovers Ceres
At Palermo, Giuseppe Piazzi spots a faint moving object that turns out to orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is the first asteroid found and is now classed as a dwarf planet.
- 1802
Howard finds nickel in fallen stones
Edward Howard and Jacques-Louis de Bournon report to the Royal Society that stones from falls in different countries share the same structure and contain nickel-bearing iron, unlike any rock at the Earth's surface.
- 28 March 1802
Olbers finds Pallas
Heinrich Olbers, a doctor in Bremen, discovers a second body between Mars and Jupiter and names it Pallas.
- May 1802
Herschel coins the word asteroid
William Herschel proposes calling Ceres and Pallas asteroids, meaning star-like, because even in his great telescopes they look like points of light.
- 26 April 1803
L'Aigle: the fall that convinced science
Thousands of stones fall around L'Aigle in Normandy. Jean-Baptiste Biot interviews witnesses and maps the fall area, and his report persuades the scientific world that stones really do fall from the sky.
- 1804
Thomson sees the pattern inside iron
In Naples, William Thomson cleans a piece of the Krasnojarsk iron with nitric acid and sees a geometric crystal pattern appear. His short report is little noticed.
- 29 March 1807
Olbers discovers Vesta
Heinrich Olbers finds a fourth asteroid, which Carl Friedrich Gauss names Vesta. It is now known to be the parent of the howardite, eucrite and diogenite meteorites.
- 14 December 1807
Weston: the first recorded American fall
Stones fall on farms around Weston, Connecticut, after a fireball and explosions. Yale's Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley investigate within days and publish a careful report.
- 1808
Widmanstätten heats the Hraschina iron
In Vienna, Alois von Beckh-Widmanstätten heats a polished slice of the Hraschina iron, and the crossing bands of its crystal structure appear in different colours. The pattern later takes his name.
- 22 May 1808
Stannern: a shower of basalt from Vesta
Some 200 or more stones fall around Stannern in Moravia. They are eucrites, volcanic rock now known to come from the crust of the asteroid Vesta, and many go to the Vienna collection.
- 10 September 1813
Stones fall near Limerick
After loud explosions, several stones fall around Adare in County Limerick, the best-known meteorite fall in Ireland.
- 1819
Chladni's catalogue of fireballs and falls
Ernst Chladni publishes a large book listing every fall and fireball he has been able to trace, from ancient times to his own day. It becomes a foundation for the new science.
- 1820
Meteorites print their own pictures
Carl von Schreibers publishes an illustrated book on meteorites in Vienna. It includes prints made by inking etched iron meteorites and pressing them onto paper, so that the irons print their own crystal patterns.
- 15 June 1821
Juvinas falls in France
A stone of about 90 kilograms falls near Juvinas in the Ardèche. It is a eucrite, a basalt from the crust of Vesta, and one of the largest of its kind ever seen to fall.
- 13 November 1833
The night the stars fell
A storm of Leonid meteors fills the sky over North America with tens of thousands of shooting stars an hour. Denison Olmsted shows they all spread from one point in Leo, proving that meteors come from space.
- 13 October 1838
Cold Bokkeveld: a carbon-rich stone
A crumbly black stone falls in the Western Cape of South Africa. Chemists find it contains carbon compounds, an early sign that some meteorites carry organic matter.
- 14 July 1847
Braunau: an iron falls in Bohemia
Two masses of iron fall near Braunau, now Broumov in the Czech Republic. A year later, fine straight lines etched on its surface are described by the physicist Franz Ernst Neumann, and they are still called Neumann lines.
Classification, craters and comets 33
Meteorites sorted into families, linked to comets and asteroids, and traced to craters.
- 1863
Gustav Rose names the chondrites
Cataloguing the Berlin collection, Gustav Rose sorts meteorites into groups and coins names still used today, including chondrite, after the small round chondrules, and howardite, after Edward Howard.
- 14 May 1864
Orgueil: a very special shower
About twenty black stones fall near Orgueil in southern France. Soft enough to cut with a knife, they are CI chondrites, whose chemistry is the closest match known to the Sun's.
- 1866
Kirkwood finds the gaps in the asteroid belt
Daniel Kirkwood shows that asteroids avoid orbits whose periods are simple fractions of Jupiter's. The repeated pull of Jupiter clears these zones, and the same process sends asteroid fragments towards Earth.
- 1866
Schiaparelli links meteors to a comet
Giovanni Schiaparelli calculates the orbit of the Perseid meteors and finds it matches Comet Swift–Tuttle, the first proof that meteor showers are made of comet dust.
- 13–14 November 1866
The Leonids return as predicted
A Leonid storm is seen from Europe, as Hubert Anson Newton had predicted from records going back a thousand years. It confirms that the shower returns about every 33 years.
- 30 January 1868
Pultusk: a rain of stones in Poland
Tens of thousands of stones fall near Pułtusk, north of Warsaw, one of the largest showers of stones on record. Most pieces are small, many only a few grams.
- 11 July 1868
Ornans gives its name to a group
A stone falls near Ornans in eastern France. It becomes the type specimen of the CO carbonaceous chondrites, a group named after its first letter.
- 1877
Sorby's drops of fiery rain
Henry Clifton Sorby, who pioneered the study of rocks in thin slices under the microscope, describes chondrules as looking like drops of fiery rain, frozen molten droplets from the early Solar System.
- 10 May 1879
Estherville: stone and iron mixed
A shower of stony-iron meteorites falls near Estherville, Iowa, after a loud fireball. The largest mass weighs about 200 kilograms. They are mesosiderites, a rare mixture of metal and broken rock.
- 14 March 1881
Middlesbrough: a stone lands by a railway
Railway workers near Middlesbrough hear a rushing noise and find a stone of about 1.6 kilograms buried in a railway embankment. It is now in the Yorkshire Museum in York.
- March 1890
Eliza Kimberly's stones are proved meteorites
The geologist Francis Cragin visits a Kansas homestead where Eliza Kimberly has piled up heavy black stones from the fields. They are pallasites, and the fall becomes known as Brenham.
- 1891
Diamonds found in Canyon Diablo iron
The mineral dealer Albert Foote describes iron meteorites from around a crater in Arizona and reports that tiny diamonds have been found inside one of them.
- 1891
Gilbert rejects an impact at Meteor Crater
Grove Karl Gilbert of the US Geological Survey studies the Arizona crater and concludes, wrongly, that it was made by a steam explosion, because he can find no buried iron mass.
- 1893
Gilbert argues the Moon's craters are impacts
In a lecture published in 1893, Grove Karl Gilbert argues that the Moon's craters were blasted out by impacts, not volcanoes, an idea far ahead of its time.
- 1897
Ahnighito arrives in New York
After years of effort, Robert Peary brings the largest of the Cape York irons, a 31-tonne mass that the Inuit had long used as a source of metal, from Greenland to New York.
- Autumn 1902
Ellis Hughes moves the Willamette meteorite
In Oregon, Ellis Hughes secretly hauls a 15-tonne iron from land owned by a steel company to his own farm. A court rules he must give it up, and it is now in New York.
- 1905
Moissanite is named
George Kunz names natural silicon carbide moissanite, after Henri Moissan, who had found it in the Canyon Diablo iron. It is almost unknown in Earth rocks.
- December 1905
Barringer makes the case for an impact
The mining engineer Daniel Moreau Barringer and the physicist Benjamin Tilghman present evidence that the Arizona crater was made by a falling meteorite. It becomes the first crater on Earth widely accepted as an impact.
- 30 June 1908
The Tunguska explosion
A huge blast over the Siberian forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river flattens about 2,000 square kilometres of trees. It was an asteroid or comet fragment exploding in the air, and no crater was made.
- 28 June 1911
Nakhla falls in Egypt
About 40 stones fall near El Nakhla el Baharia, east of Alexandria. Seventy years later they were recognised as rocks from Mars, and Nakhla gave its name to the nakhlites.
- 19 July 1912
Holbrook: 14,000 stones in Arizona
A shower of about 14,000 small stones falls near Holbrook, Arizona, after a loud explosion. Small pieces are still found in the area.
- 13 October 1914
Appley Bridge stone lands in Lancashire
A stone falls near Appley Bridge, between Wigan and Southport, after a fireball seen over northern England, and is dug out of a field.
- 3 December 1917
A shower of stones over Strathmore
Several stones fall across the Strathmore valley in Perthshire and Angus, the largest meteorite fall recorded in Scotland.
- 1920
A plough strikes Hoba
On his farm in Namibia, Jacobus Hermanus Brits's plough hits buried metal. It is the Hoba iron, about 60 tonnes, still the largest single meteorite known.
- 1921
Wegener's experiments on Moon craters
Alfred Wegener, better known for continental drift, publishes a study arguing that the Moon's craters were made by impacts, supported by experiments in which he dropped powder onto layers of powder.
- 1927
Kulik reaches the Tunguska site
Leonid Kulik leads the first scientific expedition to the Tunguska site and finds trees flattened outwards from a central point, but no crater and no large meteorite.
- 1928
Winona is found in an ancient burial
Archaeologists at Elden Pueblo near Flagstaff, Arizona, find a stony meteorite buried in a stone box by the Sinagua people. It gives its name to the winonaites.
- 1929
Moulton shows the Meteor Crater iron vaporised
Forest Ray Moulton calculates that the meteorite which dug Meteor Crater was mostly vaporised by the energy of the impact, so no giant buried mass exists.
- 1931
Henbury craters are recognised
A group of about a dozen craters in the Northern Territory of Australia, with iron meteorites scattered around them, is shown to have been made by a meteorite shower.
- 1932
Philby reaches the Wabar craters
The explorer Harry St John Philby crosses the Empty Quarter of Arabia and finds craters, black glass and pieces of iron at a site called Wabar.
- 1932
Öpik proposes a distant cloud of comets
Ernst Öpik suggests that comets come from a vast cloud of icy bodies far beyond the planets, an idea later developed by Jan Oort.
- December 1933
The Meteoritical Society is founded
Frederick Leonard and Harvey Nininger found the Society for Research on Meteorites in Chicago. Renamed the Meteoritical Society, it still sets the rules for naming and classifying meteorites.
- 29 September 1938
Benld: a meteorite hits a car
In Benld, Illinois, a stone of about 1.8 kilograms smashes through Edward McCain's garage roof and goes straight through his car, coming to rest in the seat springs.
The space age 54
Fireball cameras, Moon rocks, Antarctic ice and the first meteorites from Mars and the Moon.
- 1946
A meteorite museum opens by Route 66
Harvey Nininger opens the American Meteorite Museum on Route 66 near Meteor Crater, bringing meteorites to thousands of travellers.
- 12 February 1947
The Sikhote-Alin iron shower
A fireball brighter than the Sun crosses the Russian Far East and showers more than 23 tonnes of iron over the Sikhote-Alin mountains, digging dozens of craters. The artist Pyotr Medvedev sketches the fireball from his window.
- 18 February 1948
Norton County: the largest aubrite
A fireball over Kansas and Nebraska drops more than a tonne of stones, including a single mass of about a tonne. They are aubrites, pale rocks made almost entirely of the mineral enstatite.
- 1949
Baldwin's The Face of the Moon
Ralph Baldwin publishes a book comparing the shapes of lunar craters with explosion craters on Earth, making a powerful case that the Moon's craters were made by impacts.
- 1950
Comets as dirty snowballs
Fred Whipple proposes that a comet's nucleus is a solid lump of ice and dust, which releases the grains that later become meteor showers.
- 30 November 1954
Sylacauga: a meteorite hits a person
A stone of about 4 kilograms crashes through a roof in Sylacauga, Alabama, bounces off a radio and bruises Ann Hodges as she rests on her sofa, the first well-documented person injured by a meteorite.
- 15 March 1955
Hoba becomes a national monument
The Hoba iron is declared a national monument, protecting it from the souvenir hunters who had been cutting pieces away.
- 1956
Patterson dates the Earth with a meteorite
Using lead from meteorites, including troilite from the Canyon Diablo iron, Clair Patterson calculates that the Earth and the Solar System are about 4.55 billion years old, a figure that still stands.
- 1956
Suess and Urey list the cosmic abundances
Hans Suess and Harold Urey publish a table of how common each element and isotope is in the Solar System, drawn largely from meteorites. It becomes a key tool for understanding how stars make elements.
- 7 April 1959
Příbram: the first meteorite with a known orbit
Cameras at two Czech observatories photograph a fireball. Zdeněk Ceplecha calculates its path and orbit, and stones are found where predicted, the first meteorite traced back to its orbit around the Sun.
- 1960
Coesite proves Meteor Crater was an impact
Edward Chao and Eugene Shoemaker find coesite, a form of silica made only at enormous pressures, in rocks from Meteor Crater, proof that an impact made it.
- 1961
The Ries basin in Germany is shown to be a crater
Shoemaker and Chao find coesite in rock from the Nördlinger Ries, proving that the round basin in Bavaria, about 24 kilometres across, was made by an impact some 15 million years ago.
- 3 October 1962
Zagami falls in Nigeria
A stone of about 18 kilograms lands a few metres from a farmer in a field near Zagami. It is one of the largest Martian meteorites ever seen to fall.
- 1963
Agpalilik is found in Greenland
An expedition led by Vagn Buchwald finds a fourth great Cape York iron, Agpalilik, of about 20 tonnes. It is shipped to Copenhagen in 1967.
- 1964
Three families of ordinary chondrites
Klaus Keil and Kurt Fredriksson use the electron microprobe to measure olivine and pyroxene in hundreds of chondrites and find three clusters, the H, L and LL groups.
- 1964
Sudbury is argued to be an impact
Robert Dietz points to shatter cones around the Sudbury Basin in Ontario as evidence that it was made by a giant impact nearly 2 billion years ago.
- 24 December 1965
Barwell: Britain's biggest meteorite shower
On Christmas Eve, stones fall across the village of Barwell in Leicestershire. About 46 kilograms are recovered, the largest total mass of any British fall.
- 17 November 1966
A great Leonid storm
Observers in the western United States see the Leonids at storm level, with meteors falling at dozens per second at the peak, one of the strongest meteor storms ever recorded.
- 1967
Chondrites get their petrologic types
W. Randall Van Schmus and John Wood publish a scheme that grades chondrites by how much heat or water changed them, giving the numbers still used today, such as the 6 in L6.
- 8 February 1969
Allende: the oldest solids
About two tonnes of stones fall around Pueblito de Allende in Mexico. Their white inclusions, rich in calcium and aluminium, become the most studied grains in meteorite science and give the age of the Solar System.
- 20 July 1969
Apollo 11 brings back the Moon
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collect about 21.5 kilograms of lunar rock and soil. Moon samples later let scientists recognise lunar meteorites on Earth.
- 28 September 1969
Murchison: life's ingredients from space
About 100 kilograms of stones fall near Murchison in Victoria, Australia. Within a year scientists find amino acids in them that were made without life.
- December 1969
The first Antarctic ice field meteorites
Renji Naruse and fellow glaciologists of a Japanese expedition find nine meteorites near the Yamato Mountains on bare blue ice. Several are of different types, a sign that the ice gathers meteorites together, and the find opens a new era of collecting.
- 1970
Vesta's colour matches a meteorite
Thomas McCord and colleagues measure the spectrum of sunlight reflected from Vesta and find it matches basaltic achondrites, the first link between a meteorite type and a particular asteroid.
- 3 January 1970
Lost City: a fall caught on camera
Cameras of the Prairie Network photograph a fireball over Oklahoma. Its path is calculated, and a stone is found near the town of Lost City within a week.
- 24 September 1970
Luna 16 returns a robotic sample
The Soviet probe Luna 16 brings about 100 grams of lunar soil back to Earth, the first sample returned from another world without astronauts.
- 10 August 1972
A fireball skips off the atmosphere
A large meteoroid grazes the upper atmosphere over the western United States and Canada in daylight, filmed by tourists, and passes back out into space.
- December 1972
The last Apollo samples
Apollo 17, carrying the geologist Harrison Schmitt, returns about 110 kilograms of rock, the most from any mission. Apollo brought back about 382 kilograms in all.
- 1973
Oxygen isotopes fingerprint meteorites
Robert Clayton, Lawrence Grossman and Toshiko Mayeda show that oxygen in some meteorites has a different mix of isotopes from Earth rock, giving a fingerprint for where meteorites formed.
- 1974
Hundreds of meteorites from the Yamato ice
A Japanese team including Keizo Yanai collects 663 meteorites near the Yamato Mountains in about two weeks, showing how rich the Antarctic ice fields are.
- 1975
The Handbook of Iron Meteorites
Vagn Buchwald publishes three volumes describing about 600 iron meteorites in detail, still a standard reference.
- 1976
Evidence of a short-lived heat source
Typhoon Lee, Dimitri Papanastassiou and Gerald Wasserburg find extra magnesium-26 in Allende inclusions, showing that radioactive aluminium-26 was present when the first solids formed. Its heat helped melt early asteroids.
- 8 March 1976
Jilin: the largest stony fall seen
A shower of stones falls in Jilin province in China, including a single stone of about 1,770 kilograms, the largest stony meteorite ever seen to fall.
- December 1976
The first American Antarctic search
William Cassidy, Edward Olsen and Keizo Yanai lead a joint American and Japanese search in Victoria Land. It grows into ANSMET, which has since recovered more than 20,000 meteorites.
- 5 February 1977
Innisfree: Canada's camera network succeeds
Canada's Meteorite Observation and Recovery Project photographs a fireball over Alberta, and stones are found near Innisfree, giving a second accurate meteorite orbit from North America.
- 1978
A buried ring is found under Yucatán
Glen Penfield, flying a magnetic survey for Mexico's oil company, finds a vast curved pattern that, with Antonio Camargo, he recognises as a possible buried crater.
- 1979
Thousands of Yamato-79 meteorites
A Japanese search of the Yamato blue ice recovers more than 3,500 meteorites in one season.
- 1980
An impact and the end of the dinosaurs
Luis and Walter Alvarez and colleagues report a layer rich in iridium, an element common in meteorites, at the boundary that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs, and propose that a huge impact caused it.
- 18 January 1982
The first meteorite recognised from the Moon
John Schutt and Ian Whillans find a 31-gram stone in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. In 1983 it is shown to be a rock from the Moon, the first meteorite known to be lunar.
- 1983
Martian air trapped in a meteorite
Donald Bogard and Pratt Johnson find gas trapped in glass in the Antarctic meteorite EETA 79001 that matches the Martian atmosphere measured by the Viking landers, proof that some meteorites come from Mars.
- 27 December 1984
ALH 84001 is found
On the ice of the Allan Hills, Roberta Score spots a greenish stone of about 1.9 kilograms. It is later shown to be a 4-billion-year-old rock from Mars.
- 1987
Hoba is given to the nation
The owner of the farm where Hoba lies donates the meteorite and its site to the state of Namibia, and a visitor centre opens.
- 1987
Stardust older than the Sun
Edward Anders and colleagues isolate tiny diamonds from a meteorite and show they formed around other stars. Silicon carbide grains soon follow.
- 1989
A standard table of Solar System abundances
Edward Anders and Nicolas Grevesse publish the abundances of the elements based on CI chondrites and the Sun, used for decades across astronomy and geology.
- 1991
Chicxulub is identified
Alan Hildebrand and colleagues identify a buried crater about 180 kilometres across at Chicxulub in Mexico as the impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs.
- 15 May 1991
Glatton lands in a garden
Arthur Pettifor hears something crash through a hedge in his garden at Glatton, near Peterborough, and finds a warm 767-gram stone. It was the last recovered British fall for 30 years.
- 14 August 1992
Mbale: a shower of stones in Uganda
Stones fall on the town of Mbale, damaging roofs. A small piece strikes a boy after being slowed by a banana tree, without harming him.
- 9 October 1992
Peekskill: a fireball filmed by football fans
A fireball over the eastern United States is videoed by many people at Friday-night football games. A 12-kilogram stone hits Michelle Knapp's car in Peekskill, New York.
- 1993
Vesta's children are found
Richard Binzel and Shui Xu find a family of small asteroids with the same colours as Vesta, stretching towards a resonance with Jupiter. They show how pieces of Vesta reach Earth.
- 16–22 July 1994
A comet strikes Jupiter
More than twenty fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 crash into Jupiter, leaving dark scars larger than Earth, the first collision between two Solar System bodies ever watched.
- August 1996
Signs of life in a Martian meteorite?
David McKay and colleagues announce possible traces of ancient microbes in ALH 84001. Most scientists now think non-living processes explain the features, but the debate shaped the search for life on Mars.
- 22 March 1998
Monahans: water inside a meteorite
Stones fall in Monahans, Texas. Inside them are tiny purple crystals of rock salt holding droplets of liquid water from their parent asteroid.
- 1999
Liquid water inside a meteorite
Michael Zolensky and colleagues report tiny drops of brine trapped in salt crystals inside the Monahans meteorite, water from an asteroid billions of years old.
- 18 November 1999
A Leonid storm over Europe
The Leonids reach storm strength over Europe and the Middle East, as computer models of the comet's dust trails had predicted.
The twenty-first century 36
Asteroids tracked before impact, sample-return missions and falls caught on camera.
- 18 January 2000
Tagish Lake falls onto ice
A fireball over north-western Canada drops fragile carbon-rich stones onto a frozen lake. Some are collected without being touched by hand and kept frozen, preserving them almost untouched.
- 12 February 2001
NEAR Shoemaker lands on an asteroid
After a year in orbit, NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touches down on the asteroid Eros, the first landing on an asteroid. Its instruments show Eros is made of material like ordinary chondrites.
- 6 April 2002
Neuschwanstein: a fall traced by cameras
The European Fireball Network records a fireball over Bavaria. Pavel Spurný's team calculates the fall area, and three meteorites are found near Neuschwanstein Castle.
- 26 March 2003
Park Forest: stones hit a Chicago suburb
A fireball showers stones over Park Forest, Illinois, smashing through roofs and windows. Hundreds of pieces are collected.
- January 2005
A meteorite found on Mars
NASA's Opportunity rover finds a basketball-sized iron meteorite, nicknamed Heat Shield Rock, the first meteorite identified on another planet.
- October 2005
A giant pallasite is dug up at Brenham
Steve Arnold, using a large metal detector, finds a pallasite of about 650 kilograms buried two metres deep in a Kansas field.
- November 2005
Hayabusa touches Itokawa
Japan's Hayabusa probe briefly touches down on the small asteroid Itokawa to try to collect grains from its surface.
- 15 January 2006
Stardust brings back comet dust
NASA's Stardust capsule lands in Utah with dust collected from Comet Wild 2. Some grains formed at high temperature near the young Sun, a surprise for an icy comet.
- 15 September 2007
Carancas: a stone makes a crater
A stony meteorite strikes the high plain near Lake Titicaca in Peru and blasts a crater about 13 metres across, something scientists had thought a stone this size could not do.
- 6–7 October 2008
2008 TC3: an asteroid seen before it hit
Richard Kowalski discovers a small asteroid about 20 hours before it strikes. Astronomers predict where it will enter the atmosphere, and it explodes over the Nubian Desert of Sudan as forecast.
- December 2008
Almahata Sitta is recovered
Peter Jenniskens and Muawia Shaddad lead students from the University of Khartoum across the desert and find the first pieces of 2008 TC3. About 600 fragments are eventually collected, most of them ureilites.
- 28 February 2010
Košice: a fall traced with security cameras
A fireball over eastern Slovakia is recorded by security cameras in Hungary. From the footage its orbit is worked out, and more than 200 stones are found.
- 13 June 2010
Hayabusa returns home
Despite years of breakdowns, Hayabusa's capsule lands in Australia with tiny grains from Itokawa. They match LL chondrites, proving that these common meteorites come from S-type asteroids.
- 16 July 2011
Dawn arrives at Vesta
NASA's Dawn spacecraft enters orbit around Vesta. It maps the giant Rheasilvia impact basin near the south pole and finds minerals matching the howardite, eucrite and diogenite meteorites.
- 18 July 2011
Tissint: a fall from Mars
A fireball is seen over southern Morocco, and nomads later find fresh black stones. Tissint is one of only a handful of Martian meteorites ever seen to fall.
- 22 April 2012
Sutter's Mill: radar finds a fall
A daytime fireball over California drops carbon-rich stones near Sutter's Mill, where the 1848 gold rush began. Weather radar helps searchers find the pieces quickly.
- January 2013
Black Beauty is described
Carl Agee and colleagues describe NWA 7034, a dark Martian breccia from the Sahara containing water-bearing minerals and some of the oldest pieces of Mars known.
- 15 February 2013
The Chelyabinsk airburst
An asteroid about 20 metres across explodes over Chelyabinsk in Russia. Its shock wave breaks windows across the city and about 1,500 people are hurt, mostly by flying glass. A 650-kilogram piece is later lifted from a lake.
- 2 January 2014
A second asteroid spotted before impact
The small asteroid 2014 AA is found hours before it strikes the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean, the second ever detected before impact.
- 12 November 2014
Philae lands on a comet
The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission sets its lander Philae down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the first landing on a comet.
- 31 December 2015
Murrili is pulled from a salt lake
The Desert Fireball Network team led by Philip Bland finds a 1.7-kilogram meteorite in the mud of Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, a month after cameras caught its fireball.
- 2016
Tutankhamun's dagger is confirmed as meteoritic
A team using a portable X-ray instrument shows that the iron blade buried with Tutankhamun contains nickel and cobalt in the amounts found in iron meteorites.
- 19 October 2017
A visitor from another star
A telescope in Hawaii discovers ʻOumuamua, the first object seen passing through the Solar System from interstellar space.
- 2 June 2018
2018 LA: a piece of Vesta over Botswana
A small asteroid is spotted hours before it explodes over Botswana. Searchers find meteorites in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and they turn out to be howardites, probably from Vesta.
- 27 June 2018
Hayabusa2 reaches Ryugu
Japan's Hayabusa2 arrives at the carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu, which turns out to be a spinning-top-shaped pile of rubble.
- 3 December 2018
OSIRIS-REx reaches Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx arrives at the asteroid Bennu, finding a rugged surface covered in boulders and even throwing out small pebbles into space.
- 6 December 2020
Ryugu samples land in Australia
Hayabusa2's capsule lands in the South Australian desert with about 5.4 grams of asteroid. The samples are like CI chondrites, but untouched by Earth's air and water.
- 16 December 2020
Chang'e 5 returns Moon rock
China's Chang'e 5 brings back about 1.7 kilograms of lunar rock and soil, including volcanic rock about 2 billion years old, younger than any Apollo sample.
- 28 February 2021
Winchcombe: a meteorite on a driveway
A fireball over south-west England is filmed by doorbell and meteor cameras. A family in Winchcombe finds black stones on their driveway, the first carbonaceous chondrite fall recovered in Britain.
- 6 March 2021
The largest Winchcombe piece is found
Searching a sheep field near Winchcombe, the volunteer Mira Ihasz finds a 152-gram piece of the meteorite, the largest recovered.
- 3 October 2021
A meteorite lands on a pillow
In Golden, British Columbia, Ruth Hamilton wakes to find a 1.3-kilogram stone has crashed through her roof and landed on her pillow beside her head.
- 26 September 2022
DART strikes an asteroid
NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashes into the small moonlet Dimorphos, shortening its orbit around the asteroid Didymos by about 32 minutes, the first test of nudging an asteroid.
- 24 September 2023
Bennu samples land in Utah
OSIRIS-REx drops its capsule in the Utah desert with about 120 grams of rock and dust from Bennu, the largest asteroid sample ever returned.
- 13 October 2023
Psyche sets off for a metal world
NASA's Psyche spacecraft launches towards the asteroid Psyche, which may be the exposed metal core of a shattered early world.
- 21 January 2024
2024 BX1 falls near Berlin
Krisztián Sárneczky discovers a small asteroid about three hours before it hits. It explodes west of Berlin, and meteorites are found near Ribbeck within days. They are aubrites, a rare type.
- 7 October 2024
Hera launches to study DART's crater
The European Space Agency launches Hera to survey Didymos and Dimorphos and measure exactly what DART's impact did.
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