An unusual treasure hunt. For two weeks, residents of the small town of Liart (Ardennes) searched for an apricot-sized meteorite. Indeed, on Tuesday, January 9, a small celestial object crossed the sky and crashed into the Ardennes around 10:55 p.m.
Since then, several searches have been organized in the village of about 600 residents to find the meteorite within a 4 km long and 300 m wide perimeter, 70% of which is covered by forest, as determined using the Fripon network (for Fireball recovery). and the Interplanetary Observing Network, a scientific network whose purpose is, inter alia, to study interplanetary solid matter). Despite the motivation of volunteers, consisting of specialists and enthusiasts, the small pebble from space was never found.
“This object that we are looking for has traveled 400 million kilometers, and we are going to look for it in a very small area, because we were able to very, very precisely determine its trajectory over the last 80 kilometers, that is, they talk about its entry into the atmosphere,” – Benjamin Poupart, responsible for scientific and educational activities at the Reims Planetarium, explains to RTL. The latter also reminds us that this “little piece of the solar system” is “a little rock that is older than the Earth itself.”
Valuable for science
If the meteorite attracts so many curious people and is in such demand, it is partly because it may be valuable for science. “We study meteorites to better understand the solar system,” Sylvain Bouly, a planetary scientist at Paris Saclay University, told France 3. “Our goal is to establish a connection between the meteorite and the object’s orbit. This allows us to learn more about its origins.”
The goal of this active search is also to find it before it ends up in the hands of someone else. “The meteorite may have a market value that we cannot control” and will therefore be “lost to science.” After several organized searches, the rest of the search was entrusted to the residents for more than a week.
Source: Le Parisien
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