In the last hours of the last day of February 2021, a 29-pound chunk of space rock ripped into Earth's upper atmosphere at roughly 8.5 miles per second. As it streaked through the stratosphere, the heat and friction of entry charred its exterior a deep black. Bits of soft rock sloughed off in the blaze, and a huge fireball briefly flared like a torch in the night sky.
By the time the largest piece of debris landed abruptly in a driveway in Winchcombe, England, it weighed only 11.3 ounces. Scientists snagged the rocky, powdery material within 12 hours, making it among the freshest meteorites ever studied. “It's pretty much as pristine as we're going to get,” says Ashley King, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London.
The Winchcombe meteorite belongs to a rare class of space rocks known as carbonaceous chondrites. These volatile bodies are helping researchers piece together one of the biggest puzzles on Earth: where our planet's water came from. Researchers think some may have arrived on meteorites, but how much is hotly debated. Some argue that meteorites made it rain; others say their contribution may have been more like a drop in the bucket.
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