image: One of the most exciting things about the Sutter's Mill meteorite is the speed with which it was recovered and delivered to laboratories for analysis. This was made possible through the innovative use of weather radar to track the inbound object and predict its position on the ground. As a result, the Sutter's Mill meteorite became the most pristine object of its type that meteorite scientists have yet had the opportunity to study. This image of delicate structures within a slice of the meteorite was produced using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) at the Arkansas Nano-Bio Materials Characterization Facility at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Chondrules, the objects from which the chondrite meteorites take their name, are small rounded particles that formed at the time our solar system took shape from the collapsing remnants of the pre-solar nebula, a cloud of hot dust and gas from which our sun, planets, and asteroids formed about 4.56 billion years ago. The round form of a chondrule measuring about 0.5 millimeters across is clearly visible near the edge of the slice. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Dec. 21, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Peter Jenniskens at SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and colleagues was titled, "Radar-Enabled Recovery of the Sutter's Mill Meteorite, a Carbonaceous Chondrite Regolith Breccia." view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Robert Beauford, University of Arkansas