• Question: if the meteorites are destroyed then will you have to wait for ages till another is found?

    Asked by mfinn to Roy on 13 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Roy Adkin

      Roy Adkin answered on 13 Mar 2014:


      Hi there,
      Great question! There are quite a lot of meteorite samples but a lot of them are old and so have been on Earth for a long time which means they could be contaminated. The ones we really want to study are the falls (the ones we see and can collect immediately) because they are fresh from space.
      Of the ones we do have, the samples we analyse are tiny…just small pieces taken from larger stones. So it’s only the small pieces that are destroyed but none the less it can be quite a while before there is a new fall and we will never know when that could be.

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