Earlier this year we reported that Bennu appears to have pieces of Vesta mixed in with its rocks, and now, it turns out that a meteorite we reported on a couple of years ago may also be from Vesta. Back in 2018, a fireball was seen streaking across African skies and was traced to an impact area in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Again, Dr. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute used radar data and witness accounts as well as help from the local scientific community to locate fragments of that fireball. Twenty-three meteorites were recovered from the event – pieces that survived the destruction of a 1.5-meter parent object. 

Analysis of these fragments as well as pre-impact images taken by the Catalina Sky Survey and the SkyMapper Southern Survey allow us to understand the meteorite better than any other object so far recovered. From its chemistry, it appears these pieces are actually pieces of Vesta that got knocked off billions of years ago during an impact, and through a confluence of orbits, were able to hit our world in 2018. It’s a rock-hit-rock universe out there, which for us means free samples of space rock, no robotic sample missions required.

More Information

SETI Institute press release

“The impact and recovery of asteroid 2018 LA,” Peter Jenniskens et al., 2021 April 23, Meteoritics & Planetary Science