IT鈥橲 been an extraordinary trip for space rock 2008 TC3. First spotted on 6 October hurtling through space towards Earth, it exploded over Sudan the next day. Now tiny pieces of it have been found. The discovery means that, for the first time, we have detected a space rock ahead of a collision with Earth, watched it streak through the atmosphere and then recovered pieces of it.
According to Lindley Johnson of NASA, who reported the find on 16 February at a United Nations meeting in Vienna, the rocks were found in the Sudanese desert by a team from the University of Khartoum. They have an outer crust of singed material characteristic of meteorites.
Most meteorites are thought to be pieces of asteroids, but pinning down exactly where they came from is usually impossible. Fortunately, 2008 TC3 was observed while still in space. 鈥淚t鈥檚 often very difficult to get from a streak in the sky to what the orbit was,鈥� says Allan Treiman of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. 鈥淏ut if they鈥檝e got its location before it hit the atmosphere, they鈥檙e far better off 鈥� that鈥檚 really wonderful.鈥�
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