Pecos Enterprise
Pecos County, Texas
Monday, August 27, 1998
Water found in Monahans meteor
From Staff and Wire Reports
MONAHANS, Aug. 27, 1999 -- A rock that fell from the sky and landed in a Monahans playground in March of 1998 contained a remarkable surprise - water from the far reaches of space.
The researchers who opened the meteorite discovered tiny pockets of briny water, providing the first close look at water not originating on earth, according to an article in the journal Science.
"The existence of a water-soluble salt in this meteorite is astonishing," wrote R. N. Clayton of the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the research on the meteorite.
While astronomers have long thought that water flowed through asteroids and other bodies formed at the beginning of the solar system, the meteorite's liquid cargo offered the first chance to actually study it in a lab.
The meteorite burned through the sky the evening of March 22, 1998, and landed in a playground in Monahans where a group of seven boys found it and alerted scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
When the NASA team, including asteroid specialist Michael Zolensky, cracked open part of the meteorite at their lab, they found purple crystals of halite _ or rock salt _ that contained minuscule pockets of water with bubbles, which indicated that water flowed on whatever parent body spawned the meteorite.
Chondrite meteorites, such as the one found in Monahans, are thought to comprise some of the most primitive ingredients from the early period of the solar system, and the water in the crystals could date as far back as 4.5 billion years.
After the rock was sent off to NASA for study, it became the subject of controversy last year when the city of Monahans attempted to claim ownership of the meteorite from the seven boys involved. The council later relented and a second meteorite - found the following day by a Ward County sheriff's deputy embedded in the pavement on a street on the east side of town - remains in the city's possession.
At the time, Everett K. Gibson, a space scientist and geochemist with the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center near Houston, said the meteor fragments were stony meteorites - not the more common nickel-iron meteorites but still common.
"The unusual thing about this find was that we don't often recover them as quickly as this," Gibson told The Monahans News. "There are plenty of meteorites found but most of them are not found for a long time and are not as suited for study as these."
After it was returned to the boys, the meteor was auctioned off this past July via the Internet, and was bought for $23,000 by Big Spring businessman Mike Craddock.
Cathi Casper, a spokeswoman for the auction company. said Craddock has no apparent scientific interest in the rock, but was upset with the attempt by the Monahans City Council to take it from the boys. "He just wanted to help them out." Casper said.
Auction officials had hoped the rock would bring as much as $60,000.
