UNT astronomy workers say they found 2 samples of meteor 19FEB09

UNT astronomy workers say they found 2 samples of meteor
03:14 PM CST on Thursday, February 19, 2009
By SARAH PERRY / The Dallas Morning News

Ron DiIulio slept for only an hour last night.
The director of the planetarium and astronomy lab program at the University of North Texas couldn’t help but stay awake and study the pieces of a meteorite he found with a co-worker Wednesday.

MAX FAULKNER/Special Contributor Ron DiIulio (left), director of UNT's planetarium and astronomy lab program, and UNT observatory manager Preston Starr found these fragments, believed to be from a meteor that burned up in the earth's atmosphere earlier this week, in a pasture in West.



DiIulio and Preston Starr, the observatory manager at UNT, discovered the remnants of a meteor spotted shooting across the Texas sky Sunday.
They found the two walnut-sized fragments off a road in West, a town about 70 miles south of Dallas.
DiIulio has found other meteorites before, but these pieces are special. “To get something from space ... that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said. “And these are pristine.”
Immediately after learning about the sighting, the two men began to pinpoint the possible location with information from witnesses. The pair systematically mapped the locations and narrowed down the spot to somewhere near Fayetteville, about 230 miles south of Dallas.

They guessed wrong.
DiIulio said he and Starr wound their way to West and stopped at the Czech Bakery for a snack. A farmer, who noticed their official NASA-UNT outfits, approached them and asked what they were doing.
“Are you guys looking for the sonic boom that rattled my walls?” DiIulio recalled the farmer asking.
The farmer told the professors they should head southeast of West.
DiIulio and Starr spotted the sheriff and a deputy at a gas station near the location provided by the farmer. The deputy owned some land nearby and offered to help them find the meteorite.
At 5 p.m., after walking a few minutes down a gravel road, Starr and DiIulio spotted it - a small, charcoal-colored ball. Five minutes later, they found another.
They didn’t use any fancy electronics - just a map, truck and their eyes.
“Imagine that,” DiIulio said. “A little piece of charcoal sitting on a gravel road right there.”
The pair were lucky they found the pieces first, he said. Scientists from Moscow and two men from Tucson were also on the prowl.
DiIulio and Starr wrapped the pieces in a Ziploc bag and took them back to UNT, where they are conducting a radioisotope study today. The study will give clues about other matter in space.
DiIulio said it was important to find the pieces quickly because they start to lose certain characteristics once they hit the earth’s atmosphere.
Alan Rubin, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the meteorite that landed in Texas is among the most common kinds -- an ordinary chondrite.
He said his lab had been called on to analyzed a piece of the substance -- not from the chunks that DiIulio and Starr found -- and "it's a real meteorite, not a piece of a satellite."
Though meteorites are found all over world, DiIulio considers himself lucky. Mostly what's out there are tiny pieces -- some as small as a grain of sand.
“Every once in a while ... you get this,” he said.

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