More meteorite chunks discovered

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By Jeff Renaud
Thursday, October 22, 2009
With the national media focused on Grimsby, Ontario, a scientifically-fuelled scavenger hunt – led by a team of Western researchers – has now produced three golf ball-sized fragments of meteorite from the small town nestled between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment.
 
 
Grimsby homeowner Yvonne Garchinski and Western Physics and Astronomy associate professor Peter Brown speak to national media where a 4.6-billion-year-old meterorite smashed the window of Garchinski's truck Sept. 25. The pair are wearing gloves to protect the meteorite.aptiontexthere

“The response from the media and the people of Grimsby has really driven this hunt,” says Peter Brown, an associate professor in Western’s Department of Physics and Astronomy who specializes in the study of meteors and meteorite falls.  
 
“We are particularly appreciative of the cooperation of many landowners in the area who have allowed our research teams to have access to their property for searching.”   The meteor was captured on video by Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) on seven of its ‘all-sky’ cameras on Friday, Sept. 25. The astronomical event made headlines itself due to its brightness, estimated to be approximately 100 times brighter than a full moon.  
 
The first meteorite fragment recovered was found with a significant loss – the windshield of a Nissan Pathfinder.  
 
When Tony Garchinski heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. the night of the meteor flyby he didn’t think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom’s truck with a huge crack in it. Making note of the ‘unusual’ rocks he later found on the car’s hood, Garchinski chalked the incident up to vandalism and filed a police report.  
 
It wasn’t until two weeks later that his mother, Yvonne Garchinski, heard media reports that researchers from Western were searching West Grimsby, Ont. for possible fragments of a freshly fallen meteorite. The Garchinskis realized who the real culprit was in the case of the broken windshield -- or more specifically, what.  
 
The ‘what’ was a 46-gram (approximately the size of a golf ball) completely fusion-crusted (melted exterior) fragment of an ‘ordinary chondrite’ meteorite. Chondrites are arguably the most important type of meteorite because they are the least processed of meteorites and provide a window into the material which formed the early solar system. The meteorite is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old.
 
Phil McCausland, a postdoctoral fellow at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science & Exploration, and Brown presented the found meteorite to national media Oct. 16 at the Garchinski home in Grimsby with the family on hand to tell their remarkable story. Global Television, CTV, CBC Television, The Globe and Mail, CHCH, City TV, A News and a half-a-dozen other local media outlets attended the media conference on the Garchinski’s front lawn.   
 
“Having both the video and the sample is golden because we get the dynamic information and the orbital direction from the video, and by having recovered material on the ground, we can complete the picture. We can take a rock that we now have in hand and we can study it in the best laboratories in the world and we can put it back into its solar system context. We can put it back into where it came from,” explains McCausland.
 
“In all of history, only about a dozen meteorite falls have that kind of record.”
 
Brown says, “Scientifically, it’s equivalent to a sample return mission, which is sending a spacecraft out to a known location in the solar system and bringing back a sample. In this case though, the sample comes to us. We don’t have to spend huge sums of money to send a spacecraft to get the sample.  
 
“We’ve worked out the orbit, where it came from, so it becomes a material within context. It’s like a geologist who can pick up a rock which may be interesting, but if you know where it came from, that context, it means so much more. Most meteorites, we don’t have the context. This one we do.”  
 
Yvonne Garchinski has loaned the ‘pristine’ meteorite sample to Western but it remains her property as meteorites found in Canada belong to the owner of the land upon which they are discovered.  
 
The Garchinski property is a mere 200 metres off the fall line of the meteorite the Western Meteor Physics Group calculated using data from its video, radar and sound detection systems and thanks in large part to this research – along with a lot of luck – two more meteorite fragments have been found.  
 
The second meteorite was found by the Western team not far from the Garchinski home but the land owner wishes to remain anonymous. The third fragment was found Oct. 18 by professional meteorite hunter Mike Farmer (www.meteoriteguy.com) on the side of a road in West Grimsby.  
 
The Western-led search continues and both Brown and McCausland believe more fragments will be found.
 
Watch the video
The bright flare of a falling meteor was captured Sept. 25 on Western ‘all sky’ cameras set up to record and track such events. http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/25sept2009/ 

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