Search for meteorites

(Updated)

Scientists are asking for the public’s help looking for pieces of a meteorite that first appeared as a big fireball over southern Ontario earlier this week.

The basketball-sized fireball lasted for about five seconds, starting near Port Dover and ending near St. Thomas, where researchers from Western University and NASA met with media to ask for extra eyes on the ground.

Peter Brown is with Western University: “Almost right where we’re standing, about 30 km overhead, the object went dark, and based on all the video records, we know at least one, maybe more rocks survived the passage through the atmosphere.”

They know that the object was inside earth’s orbit. It wasn’t as bright as the one that hit Russia last year, but it’s still unusual.

Peter says: “This is very unusual that theres a fireball that produces a meteorite where you know the orbit. Each one of those is like a rosetta stone — it tells us something about the early solar system. so we hope that if someone finds one they’ll at least let us study it.”

It’s the first meteorite fall like this in southern Ontario since the one in Grimsby in 2009. Then also, people were asked to look for the dull, black rocks. And this man realized what had crashed through his windshield a few days before. Now the same call is going out north of St. Thomas.

Peter says: “Who may have actually heard the rocks coming down, whistling sound or even a thud. Those are the eyewitness reports we’re most interested in.”

The university is assembling teams of volunteers to come back here over the next few days and do grid searches to look for meteorites but they don’t think they’ll have any luck. They believe if anyone finds any meteorites, it’ll be a member of the general public.

Phil McCausland is with Western University: “Meteorites, when they’re freshly fallen, they really sit on the surface and they look weird.”

Meteorites won’t be hot to touch or otherwise dangerous — but you should avoid touching them to preserve the science.

Additional video: News Now coverage of the Western University news conference: