At about the time of the formation of the Earth and Solar System, an asteroid was formed as well. Four-and-a-half billion years later, on March 21, a chunk of it crashed into Sherrie James' home north of Houston.
The meteorite, roughly the size of a large fist, tore through the roof of James' home in spring, smashed into the floor of her daughter's bedroom, bounced back up to the ceiling, and finally landed by her daughter's bed.
James, who had been in her bathroom doing her hair, ran to her daughter's bedroom with her grandson.
"You've got a hole in the ceiling," she remembered her grandson saying.
Light pouring in from the mid-March sky, James looked up and saw it. Above the bed, she noticed a dent in the ceiling. Her first thought was that her daughter had done the damage.
"I'm getting mad," James remembered. "I'm like, was she jumping on the bed or something?"
Then she looked down and saw it — the meteorite that had traveled as much as millions of miles across the Solar System had landed there in Spring, Texas. It was part of a meteor, estimated by NASA to have weighed about a ton with a diameter of three feet. As it moved at about 35,000 miles per hour, it broke apart about 29 miles just south of Spring, unleashing as much energy as about 26 tons of TNT, the equivalent of about 100 lightning strikes happening at once.
For James, it was one of the defining moments of her life. It brought existential questions about her place in the universe into her home, almost literally.
"I just felt special, I felt honored," she said. "Really, I'm like, ‘You come to see me. I didn't want you to come that way, coming through my roof, but I'm just happy to be a part of it."
Now, that meteorite is on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences indefinitely, free and open to the public. "Fall to Earth" allows Houstonians to see a bit of recent Space City history in person, with the meteorite in a glass casing along with an immersive video presentation about how the 4.5-billion-year-old rock ended up in Houston.
Look up
Ironically, when the meteorite streaked across the sky on March 21 — creating a buzz on social media and local news — the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference had just wrapped up the day before in The Woodlands. That meant that the exact type of person who would be interested in something like a meteorite crashing into the Earth were in Greater Houston when a meteorite crashed into the Earth.
"I did not go because I already had a trip to The Woodlands for like five days straight," Tao Sun, a researcher at Rice University, said. "So I decided, okay, I'm not going, someone's going to go, someone's going to get something."
Sure enough, researchers and meteorite-watchers found meteorite fragments and donated them to Rice, where they were researched at the new Rice Astromaterials Research and Exploration (RARE) laboratory. Within a day, Gelu Costin, another researcher, said, the team was analyzing these samples.
Under the microscope, Costin determined the meteorite to be a chondrite, a stony kind of meteorite. Chondrites make up the vast majority of all meteorites that fall to the Earth. At first glance, the meteorite fragments did not look unique, but under the microscope it looked a bit less normal. It lacked chondrules, small round grains most chondrites typically have.
"It still fits the ordinary chondrite [label], but the chondrite suffered something, some terrible processes that erased the actual picture," Costin said.
It's difficult to know exactly where the meteorite came from but based on the trajectory from which it entered the atmosphere, Costin said the meteorite could have come from the furthest parts of the asteroid belt, closer toward Jupiter.
Science on display
Meteors falling to the Earth is pretty common. NASA estimates that as much as 48.5 tons of meteoric material falls on Earth every day, but almost all of that burns up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere. The pieces that do make it all the way down to Earth, then, are often tiny shards, making them difficult to spot — especially in rugged terrains.
"It's not common to find meteorites in a forest or a park," Costin said. "The fact that these [Houston] meteorites fell, and the fall was actually documented and witnessed — it is great because you can go and find the meteorite here."
For James, whose meteorite left a hole in her roof, the discovery was life changing. She knew it was a meteorite immediately, she remembered, even when law enforcement officers thought otherwise. But learning that the meteorite was billions of years old, and that it's now hers, was humbling.
Researchers and journalists were outside her home, asking to see the meteorite. The hole in her roof was repaired free of charge by Allied Exteriors — another blessing, James said.
When I heard what my [home insurance] deductible was, I didn't file a claim," she said with a laugh. "So that stopped it right there."
Carolyn Sumners, vice president of astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, said the meteorite that crashed into James' home, specifically, is virtually priceless because its fall — and its crash landing — were so well documented.
"We know exactly how it fell and what it hit," Sumners told Houston Public Media. "It hit her roof; it slowed down; it entered her daughter's bedroom; it bounced from the floor to the ceiling, and then back again and landed on her bed. So that's pretty impressive. We have the documentation of exactly everything it did on the way down. So I think that's what makes it special."
"My goal really is to let it stay here in the museum," James said. "I mean, what am I going to do with it, put it on my mantle? This is too extraordinary to keep. A lot of people are telling me, ‘You ought to keep it.' For what? What's it going to do in my house? This is something to be shared."
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