Astronomy - June 2015

(Jacob Rumans) #1
TAYLOR MAHONEY

58 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2015

A renowned meteorite hunter turns his


gaze to the sky as part of a growing network


of fireball trackers. by Eric Betz


To c atc h a


shooting star


ROOFTOP SCIENCE


S

teve Schoner once spent 17 years
looking for a single rock. He criss-
crossed thousands of miles in
hundreds of days walking the area
around Glorieta Mountain in New
Mexico. Along the way, he fell down a
cliff, was confronted by a bear, hid from
drug smugglers in the dark, and saw more
rattlesnakes than he could count.
Most of the time, he hiked alone,
watching the ground and listening for tell-
tale beeps from a metal detector — sounds
he hoped would lead him to a 40-pound
(18 kilograms) asteroid remnant richly
laden with yellow-hued stones.

Schoner was among the most prolific
meteorite hunters in the Southwest from
the early 1970s until a rare brain disease
nearly claimed his life in 2003. He searched
for then what he still searches for now:
billion-year-old chunks of space rocks left
over from the chaotic upstart of our solar
system. His slow uphill climb from disabil-
ity now forces him to hunt meteors with a
computer screen and an automated rooftop
camera instead of wandering alone in a
remote wilderness. The instrument is part
of a growing network of fireball video
recorders, which use black-and-white wide-
angle cameras to capture the entire sky
when triggered by celestial movement.
These devices are giving astronomers new

insights into Earth’s interactions with the
space debris that surrounds us.

Cosmic dust
A meteoroid spends billions of years drift-
ing about the solar system — either as part
of a comet or asteroid, or even a chunk of
the Moon or another planet — before it
crosses paths with Earth and is violently
ripped apart in the atmosphere. Rare mar-
tian rocks can be as young as a few tens of
millions of years old, but common meteor-
ites (the term for a space rock once it’s land-
ed on Earth) are time capsules of planetary
infancy dating back some 4.5 billion years.
Small bits of rock are falling to
Eric Betz is an associate editor of Astronomy. Earth all the time. Estimates vary, but

Steve Schoner processes meteorites in his office, the former home of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.
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