Adapted from How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense by Robin George Andrews. Copyright © 2024 by Robin George Andrews. Used with permission of the writer, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
It took a few days to be satisfied, Rob Wilcock informed me, sipping his espresso in a London bookstore’s café. “I don’t think about meteorites. I don’t know how unusual they are.” All he, his spouse Cathryn, and his daughter Hannah knew was that they’d about eleven ounces of black sooty one thing “in a Waitrose freezer bag” sitting of their home. “In the utility room, of course,” he added, subsequent to a meals processor. “Next door had twenty grams” (lower than an oz.). Only after they’d scooped up the thriller matter, and after having seen planetary scientists froth excitedly about a new meteor all around the information, did Rob come to a assured conclusion: that charred confetti of their home needed to have come from outer area.
The Wilcocks hail from the English city of Winchcombe, which, till March 2021, was like a number of different settlements within the Cotswolds: bucolic, residence to verdant countryside panoramas, masterfully manicured gardens, and a requisite fortress. It was used to internet hosting guests from across the UK and even farther afield. But on February 28, it acquired a customer that had traveled a record-breaking distance. At about 10 p.m. native time, it exploded pretty quietly within the evening sky, sending items in all instructions. At the time, the one those that seen have been members of the UK Fireball Alliance, a group of meteor aficionados led by the Natural History Museum in London. The alert went out: one thing simply blew up over the county of Gloucestershire. What occurred to it?
Like many residents of Winchcombe that serene Sunday evening, Rob, Cathryn, and Hannah have been chilling out at residence. Hannah, who was upstairs in a road-dealing with bed room, thought she heard a clattering noise, a bit like a image body falling off the wall in one other room. Unable to establish the supply, she didn’t suppose a lot of it till the following morning, when she regarded outdoors on the driveway and noticed a pile of Stygian soot. The trio went outdoors and stared at it. Did somebody throw this at them? Did a cryptic beast depart it as some form of message?
Rob texted his sons—POSSIBLY FROM SPACE?—accompanied by photographs of the peculiar pile. That’s when one among his sons, Daniel, alerted them to fireball reviews throughout the area. Rob leaped on-line, and he discovered an alert despatched out by scientists to these within the county: should you dwell within the space and you’ve got discovered one thing bizarre and rock-like that wasn’t there earlier than, for the love of God, please don’t ignore it, or wash it away with a hose—preserve it someplace protected.
Imagine you’re on this scenario, and also you aren’t a scientist or somebody who’s made area their passion. What would you do should you have been confronted with a pile of extraterrestrial dandruff on your driveway? They didn’t know if it was hazardous or risky, Cathryn informed me. Should they go close to it? It regarded like an anthill fabricated from espresso grounds, and though it might have most likely made an out-of-this-world espresso, they did what any wise household would have performed at that stage: placed on rubber gloves, scoop it into polyethylene sandwich luggage and plastic yogurt pots, brush within the smaller bits with toothbrushes and chrome steel knives, seal all of it up, and put it in the home.