 Hi everyone, my name is Ashley and I'm a planetary scientist based at the Natural History Museum in London. And for the last year or so we've been really busy working with the Winchcombe meteorite which fell in the UK in February 2021. And this summer we're looking forward to being at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, where you can come and see a piece of the Winchcombe meteorite and learn about what it can tell us about the history of our solar system. So as a planetary scientist, one of the really important questions I have is how do we end up with the solar system that we have today? What's happened for the last 4.6 billion years that's created this system where we have a central star, the Sun, surrounded by four rocky inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and then the gas and ice giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And we also have these regions where we have much smaller, more primitive objects. We have the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. And this is mainly smaller, rocky and metal rich bodies, really the building blocks for our solar systems, all the materials that went into making planets are locked up within those asteroids. And if we go right to the edge of our solar system we have things like the Kuiper Belt, and this is where icy objects, things like comets and places like Pluto formed a long way from the sun where temperatures were much colder. So how did all these materials come together and how they evolved to form our solar system is one of the key questions that we have. And one of the ways that we can study that is by pointing telescopes at other planets and looking at other solar systems. We can also send spacecraft and missions off to visit other worlds. So for example, we've sent spacecraft to the moon and to Mars and we have things in orbit, studying the surfaces of lots of different planets. One of the ways I do it though, is by studying extraterrestrial materials. So bits of rock and metal that come from space and land here on the earth, or brought back to us by spacecraft. And so what happens sometimes in the asteroid belt is two objects, two of those asteroids will actually collide together and knock some of that rocky and metal rich material off. And it will go hurtling in towards the sun. And sometimes if the earth gets in the way it comes through our atmosphere, and that's what we call a shooting star or a fireball you get to really bright streak in the sky. And if any of that material actually lands on the earth surface that's what we call a meteorite. And so I study meteorites at the Natural History Museum to learn about how those asteroids formed and what those asteroids can tell us about how our solar system formed. We also have some really rare meteorites that come from Mars. So these are bits of rock that were knocked off the surface of Mars and have landed here on earth and they are the only samples of Mars that we have available to study here in the laboratories on earth. We also have meteorites that come from the moon. But unlike Mars, we also have some rocks that were brought back by the astronauts in the 1960s and 70s, and also samples of the moon that were collected by different spacecraft. We've also sent a couple of missions off to collect samples from asteroids. This was the Hayabusa and Hayabusa two missions run by the Japanese Space Agency. We've even collected tiny, tiny dust particles from a comet. This was done by NASA's World Two Mission about 20 years ago. So we study those meteorites and those other extraterrestrial materials to learn about how our solar system formed. And what happened at the end of February 2021 is that we actually had a meteorite fall in the UK, which was really exciting for all of us in the planetary science community. So this is a little video that shows what happened. So this was just before 10pm on Sunday the 28th of February. There was this really, really bright streak in the sky. This is what we call a fireball. So this was a piece of rock coming from space, entering our airspace atmosphere and travelling above the United Kingdom. And this was seen by hundreds, if not thousands of people all across the United Kingdom and also in parts of other regions in northern Europe. I'll just play that video again. So this rock, as it came in, weighed maybe about 10 to 15 kilos. It was travelling at nearly 15 kilometres per second. So that sounds really fast, but for these types of objects that's relatively slow. And it also came in on quite a shallow angle. And so this meant that the rock, most of that material was destroyed as it came through in this bright streak. But some of it actually made it down onto the Earth's surface. And because we have camera networks all over the UK able to record these fireball events. So I'll just play that one more time. So we can actually work out where any of those rocks may have landed. So that night, we had all these fireball videos, we had all these eyewitness accounts and we quickly calculated that there might be rocks somewhere near the town of Winchcombe in the United Kingdom. And that's exactly where we found that material the next day. So the main rock that came down from that fireball actually landed on somebody's driveway in the town of Winchcombe, the Wilcock family. And they sent us these amazing pictures. So they went to bed on Sunday night and this was not on their drive. They woke up the next morning and you can see this splatter of material with the rays coming off here on their driveway. It looked like an upturned barbecue. But this was a meteorite fall landing here in the United Kingdom. And so we got really excited as planetary scientists and we, we managed to get ourselves over to Winchcombe and meet with the Wilcock family and meet with other people in the local area, we found other bits of pieces of the meteorite. And we collected that material really, really quickly. And we brought it back to the Natural History Museum where we curate and we look after the UK's national meteorite collection. We also had teams out searching in the local area. So normally when there's a meteorite fall, there often isn't just one rock, but there might be several different bits of meteorite that landed across an area that we call the stream field. And so there were people traveled from all over the United Kingdom to come and walk along in the local area and look for for bits of black rock in the fields. And so most meteorites that outer surface is really dark and shiny and that's because they have what we call a fusion crust that forms as they come through the atmosphere. So during that bright period that flashed through the atmosphere, they kind of get cooked on the outside and they give them a really dark, very shiny appearance. But it really is only the outer layer of the rock that gets hot. Everything else inside stays completely cool. So the planetary scientists spent about a week or so in the local area around Winchcombe and the town, a little village called Woodman Coat, walking around. So what they do is they form these lines, a couple of meters apart, and you just walk up and down a field looking for black, shiny rocks. And just a few days after the fall, one of the teams from the University of Glasgow actually came across this amazing rock in a sheep field. And so this is a this is what a freshly fallen meteorite that hasn't gone splat onto much driveway looks like. So this dark layer here. This is the fusion crust that formed. So in total, during that week or so we were able to recover about 500 grams of the Winchcombe meteorite, which is really exciting for us. The first meteorite is actually the first meteorite to be recovered in the UK for 30 years. So this isn't something that happens every day. And when it does happen, we were very excited and we were amazed, amazingly could actually collect this material really, really quickly and start working and analyzing it, less than a week after it formed. It's the first UK meteorite that has what we call a pre atmosphere orbit. So because we have all the camera footage we were able to work out whereabouts that meteorite landed. So we had a good idea where to go and search, but also we can work out whereabouts that rock came from in space, and this gives us context for the rocks. So most meteorites we don't have that information for. So really all we have is a jumble of different rocks that have come to us from the solar system. But for a very small number where we've been able to record that fireball, we actually can work out the orbit and say which region of the solar system that came from, and that helps us understand our solar system much better. And then the which can meet you right is the first ever carbonaceous contract type meteorite recovered in the United Kingdom. And these are amazing rocks because they're the oldest meteorites. They're just about 4.6 billion years old. They're just about older than the earth, and they also contain things like water. And they contain, as the name suggests, a small amount of carbon material and that includes really simple organic type materials. So these are the kind of primitive building blocks of our solar system. What's happening over the last year or so is that we've been studying at the Natural History Museum but also all across the United Kingdom, and also we've sent samples off to places like NASA and the Japanese Space Agency. We've been firing x-rays and lasers and electron beams at this meteorite, trying to understand what the which can meet your eyes made of and what it can tell us about the origins of our solar system. It's a carbonaceous chondrite and these are the building blocks of our solar system. So the materials within the which can meet you right date back right to the start to the birth of our solar system. So there's things in there that are just over 4.6 billion years old. So they tell us about the original materials in our solar system and how those materials came together to start making planets. What's really, really exciting about the which can meet you right is it contains some water. So this isn't quite liquid water sloshing around in the meteorite, but it's locked up in the minerals. And so it tells us that came from an asteroid that formed in the outer part of our solar system where there are ices. And that water potentially could be delivered to the earth to actually give us a source of water for the for the oceans and the rivers and lakes that we see here on earth. So we know that the which can meet you right contains about 2% carbon in it, and that carbon forms and different minerals called carbonates that form through water, but they also include some really simple organic organic compounds. And so this isn't life, but it's those building blocks it's those ingredients that we need to come together to start the process of life forming on the earth. So it's like Winchcombe and the asteroid that it came from probably played a really important role in the origin of oceans and kickstarting life here on earth. And so we're as I said we're really excited we're going to be at the Royal Society summer science exhibition where you can come and hear more about how I've been studying the which can meet you right and see some other types of meet you right. You can come and talk to us about the moon Mars, how impacts happen. You can come and actually try your own meteorite hunt as well, and use some of the analytical techniques such an electron microscope that we've been using to study the which can meet you right. But if you can't make it to the summer science exhibition, then you can also go and see a piece of the which can meet you right on display, either the natural history museum in London. But also you can go to which can itself, and they have a little museum there that also has its own display. So hopefully at some point this summer, you'll get a chance to see the which can meet you right, learn a little bit about story and what it can tell us about the origins of our system.