TCU
A series of sonic booms that shook a Texas ranch near El Sauz in the Rio Grande Valley in mid-February is no longer a mystery. The cause of the ruckus, which was reported all the way into Mexico, turned out to be a 1,000-pound meteor. This celestial object was reported to be traveling nearly 30,000 mph with an energy equal to eight tons of TNT when it crash-landed on Earth.
The meteor was reported to have mostly disintegrated before it broke apart 21 miles above the Earth. Some of the fragments that actually made it through the atmosphere as meteorites landed in a remote swath of ranchland that consists of sandy soil, and grass, waiting to be found.
The largest piece of this debris, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds, was found by Marc Fries, a NASA planetary scientist, and his wife Linda Fries, as well as meteorite hunters Robert Ward and Phil Mani.
“The hunting is always exciting,” Mani, a Fort Worth-based oil and gas attorney told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in February.
NASA released a map the day after the meteor arrived, highlighting an area where meteorites would have likely fallen, and the impromptu search party of four used this as their starting point.
Fries, put a map together, starting with reported meteor sightings and then honing in using radar and satellite data. He and his wife made their way to where the strewn map indicated meteorites would have landed and were later joined by Mani and pro-meteorite hunter Robert Ward.
Since they started their hunt, the group has recovered five meteorites, one of which has been taken to Houston for analysis to determine its classification and what it’s made of. Once the analysis of the meteorite is complete, it will be donated to TCU’s Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery by the owner of the ranch.
Rhiannon Mayne, chair of Meteoritics and Planetary Science and curator for the Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery at TCU, says, “The Monnig Meteorite collection is one of the largest university-based meteorite collections in the world with 2,500 meteorites and 3,000 total pieces.”
But the hunt isn’t over by any means. Although 90 percent of the meteor is estimated to have burned up entering Earth’s atmosphere there is still an estimated 50 to 100 pounds of debris that has survived as meteorites. So far, meteorite hunters have collected roughly 9 pounds of the debris.
