 Today we're here to discuss the very exciting news that a piece of space rock that lit up the night skies in a bright fireball over the UK and northern Europe on the 28th of February has actually been found. This is the first meteorite to be recovered in the UK in over 30 years and so has quite rightly got the UK science community very excited. A team of specialist scientists from across the UK went out in search of the meteorite after the fireball was spotted and its trajectory had been calculated. This included colleagues from the University of Glasgow, Manchester, Plymouth, Imperial College London and of course the Open University where I'm speaking to you from today. I'm Natalie Starkey, currently a public engagement officer for physics with the Open University but previously a meteorite researcher. So I've gathered together some of my amazing meteorite expert colleagues, some of whom were involved in the recovery of the meteorite last week to ask them a few questions about why this is such an exciting event for UK science. We'll start with Professor Monica Grady who has spent her career investigating meteorites. Hi Monica and welcome. Now, one of the questions I've got for you is how do we go about detecting these events and locating the place where the meteorite fell? Who saw this fireball and how did they figure out where to look for the rock on the ground? Lots and lots of people saw the fireball because you can stand outside if these are happening and see it. Very fortuitous but lots of people saw it. It was recorded on doorbell webcams but it was also recorded by specific cameras which are set up to record these things. There's a fireball network. It was recorded by cameras in the UK, by cameras in France and we've worked with colleagues in Australia to take all those observations. This camera says it's going like that and this camera says it's going like that and this camera says it's going like that. And you cross them all over and you trace them all back and eventually they all come back to one particular place and you say, right, we think that's where it has landed. And you go look there and there it was. Now how rare is it that we've actually been able to do this for a meteorite and go out and find it so soon after it fell? Meteorites fall all the time. You'd be surprised how many fall but usually we don't see them when they come as a fireball like this. It's really rare. There's, oh, I don't know, less than a dozen have been tracked in this way and that's only over the last sort of 10 years or so. So it's really rare to be able to do this and to have the opportunity to do it over the UK is absolutely unbelievable. It's absolutely fascinating and it's credible that it's actually even found on the ground because it's relatively quite small. So we're going to move on to Dr. Richard Greenwood. Now you're actually involved with the recovery of the pieces of rock from Gostershire. So what was your role in trying to find these rocks? Well, I kept in contact with various members of the team who narrowed down the area and in particular actually came from that traditional museum. And he'd gone on television and had made an appeal to the general public to ask them, you know, if they find a black rock, could they get in contact? And they did. And so he had what he described as a robes gallery, a big list of pictures. And he asked me to try and find a few of them where there have been some difficulty in actually getting hold of the owner. So I did a little bit of detective work and the one or two of them looked incredibly interesting. And so I finally got in contact with the people concerned and I headed over to the area. And so around about quarter to three, on this particular afternoon, I parked my car. I walked up the drive, I met the owner, and he produced a bag, plastic bag, as he had been asked to by Ashley containing all the fragments. And so I opened the bag and I looked in and I just couldn't believe what I had seen. Inside of all these fragments of a type that was totally unique to United Kingdom. And I recognize them because it was a meteorite that I've worked on 30 years early, a very rare meteorite from South Africa. And when I realized that we had just had land in the United Kingdom for the very first time, a meteorite of this very rare type. I must say, I did get a little bit emotional. I had to sort of hold it together and explain to the chap that his suspicions were absolutely correct. And on his driveway had landed the first meteorite in the UK for 30 years. And what was more, the first type that it ever landed the 250 years of studying the tribes in United Kingdom. So it was an exceptional event. Oh, it's absolutely fascinating. What happens to these pieces of rocks that were recovered? Well, I was there with this really exciting situation and I knew I needed some help. So I quickly got in contact with Ashley King and I said to Ashley, look, you need to come now. This is big. And so Ashley got on the train to Shelton and three hours later, we both returned and we discussed the situation with the owners. Ashley put in place all the requirements that were needed. The samples were collected from the owner and they went back to London to the Natural History Museum where they're going to be curated and they're being curated at the moment. And they're available for science. So scientists will be able to apply for these samples for their work. It really is a brilliant situation. Thank you so much. I'm going to move on to Dr Ian Frankie. You've also like the others on this call worked on meteorites for your whole career. So again, it must be a very exciting moment for you. Now, one of the confusions is that I've heard that some of the rock was found in a village called Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. So we're often referring to the rocks as the Winchcombe meteorite. But I understand some of them were also found in a village called Woodman Coates. So what will this meteorite be called? Given that it seems like it's lots of pieces scattered over quite a large area in England. So meteorite showers as they call these falls are quite common. So there is a formal procedure within the Nomenclature Committee for meteorite naming. This will be assessed in due course once the nature of the sample is also being studied in more detail. But my understanding is that it will be the primary place of geographic interest will be the name of the meteorite. So it's not up for me or anybody else in this call to make that decision. I've understood so far that Winchcombe does sound like a very suitable name for this meteorite given its historical background and importance for many centuries. So do we know much about what type of meteorite we're looking at? And is it very rare or what do we know about it so far? Well, as Richard already alluded to, it is this very dark coloured rock. It's got small white flecks in it as well, which tells us it's probably a carbonaceous chondrite. That's some of the most interesting and most unusual types that we have in our meteorite collection. These things have a composition very much like the bulk stun as it were. It tells us about the formation of the solar system and what was going on four and a half billion years ago. These carbonaceous chondrites have different types. This is probably a CM type and maybe Ross can expand a little bit about what he's been doing to tell us a bit more detail about the types of rocks. But these are very complex things and they can be made of different types of rock, all from a sort of similar types of bodies. And so we do need to take it apart in more detail to really understand what it is before saying it's this particular type. OK, that leads me on really nicely to Ross Findlay, who actually we've got you in the lab right this moment analysing some of this samples. So what is it you're doing? What are you hoping to find out for the community? Well, over the weekend and the few days prior to that, I actually got the first kind of look at the hands-on samples, some of the hand specimens. And they are black, they're like charcoal, little bits in them held together with other bits and some dusty black matrix. And this beautiful like matte fusion crust on the outside where enter the atmosphere and bladed away some of the meteorite through the heating. And my job is to take a little piece of this meteorite away from the contaminated surface. And that looks to be free from the fusion crust and actually crush it up and analyse it for its oxygen isotope composition in our oxygen isotope laboratory at the OU. And the oxygen isotopic composition of a meteorite is a bit like a fingerprint. It can tell you what group of meteorites it might belong to. So me and the wonderful oxygen isotope technician James Malley spent the weekends getting a few analyses and replicates. And at present, yeah, it looks like a carbonaceous ponderite. Moving on to Professor Mahesh Anand. Why is it important that this meteorite was recovered so quickly and brought back to the lab? So I think for some of the reasons what Ian mentioned, that because the nature of this material that is making up this meteorite is so unique and so fragile that longer it is exposed to the terrestrial atmosphere, it is going to compromise the quality of science that actually we can get out of this material. So imagine like a space mission going to another place to collect the samples. We take all the duke hair to actually bring it back to the earth and then curate it forever for posterity so that everybody can work on it. And likewise, we want to treat these unique rare events just as a return mission. So we strive to get to the location as soon as we could, collect it and then curate it properly. Now there is a slight clarification that I think we should make. So I believe that within the 12 hours of its fall, the owners were able to collect it in the bag. However, we didn't collect the sample of them until Wednesday afternoon, which would have been two additional days. But I think in the present context that is still within a very short period of time. And in fact, this would be probably I'm not wrong in saying this would be a world record in having a meteorite fallen somewhere to then locate it and then bring it to the laboratory to do the first analysis on it. And I think we cannot thank everybody who was involved in this process, particularly during the pandemic times where we needed a huge amount of health and safety risk assessment. And for that, I really admire our colleagues at the Open University who facilitated this and the wider UK community who is now going to reap the benefit by doing science on this sample. And finally, we're going to come back to Professor Monica Grady. What does this meteorite represent for the UK science community now? The meteorite represents a fantastic opportunity. One of the things we've been gearing up for is the return of samples from asteroids. Two are on their way back at the moment. One from an asteroid called Bennu and one from an asteroid called Ryugu. What we've had is something that's come for free. It's probably going to be like the material coming back from these asteroids. We're going to be able to do a dry run for analyzing these samples. We're going to be able to get a whole consortium of all the specialists in the UK who have lots of different sorts of expertise from looking at the rock down a microscope, at higher and higher and higher magnification for taking the spectra of it, for its isotopes, its chemistry, for the minerals that it's made for. We're going to tease it apart grain by grain and measure everything, especially the organics in there, because it's probably got things like that formed life, building blocks of life, not viruses or anything like that, but the building blocks, the molecules, and we're going to take it apart grain by grain. And we're going to find out all about it. We're going to tell its story. Thank you so much. That's been a fascinating chat with all of you. I wish you all the best of luck analyzing this meteorite and your colleagues or the other universities that are involved. I look forward to hearing more about learning about this meteorite in the future. Thank you.