Martian meteorite anniversary reminds residents of Raleigh collection
The quiet morning of June 28, 1911 near the village of Nakhla, northwest of Alexandria, Egypt was rocked by a series of aerial explosions, frightening villagers and their animals as meteorite fragments fell into an area about 4.5 kilometers in diameter.
Posted — UpdatedThe quiet morning of June 28, 1911 near the village of Nakhla, northwest of Alexandria, Egypt was rocked by a series of aerial explosions, frightening villagers and their animals as meteorite fragments fell into an area about 4.5 kilometers in diameter.
This meteorite fall is legendary among astronomers, not just because it was Egypt’s first, but also because a dog was supposedly struck and “vaporized” by one of the meteorite fragments. According to the story told by Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim, a farmer who claims to have witnessed the event, one of those fragments “fell on a dog...leaving it like ashes in a moment.”
While no evidence of a perished pooch has ever surfaced, about 40 fragments totaling more than 1.5 pounds were recovered in an investigation by the Geological Survey of Egypt It would take another 75+ years and data from a NASA planetary mission to verify just how special the Nakhla meteorite is.
Based on atmospheric data from the Viking mission compared to gases trapped in the meteorite, the Nakhla meteorite was found to be a rare piece of Mars. Of the over 60,000 or so meteorites that have been discovered on Earth, only 124 have been identified as originating on Mars.
The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has samples of six Mars meteorites on display outside the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Lab on the 3rd floor of the Nature Research Center. Four samples from the Zagami meteorite collected in 1962 in Nigeria (the second meteorite found to contain a significant trapped Martian atmosphere and the largest Martian meteorite found to date), a sample from the Tissint meteorite which took 1.1 million years to reach Earth, where it fell in 2011 in Morocco, and a segment of the 172 million year old Los Angeles Meteorite that visitors can touch.
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