Rare 17-pound meteorite discovered in Antarctica

During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites — including one of the largest ever found on the continent.

The rare meteorite is about the size of a cantaloupe but weighs a hefty 17 pounds (7.7 kilograms). The specimen is one of only about 100 that size or larger discovered in Antarctica, a prime meteroite-hunting location where more than 45,000 space rocks have been tracked down.

Now, the exceptional find is heading to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, where it will be studied. And Maria Valdes, a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago who was part of the expedition team, has kept some of the material for her own analysis.

Valdes’ area of focus is cosmochemistry. That “broadly means that we use meteorites to study the origin and evolution of the solar system through chemical methods,” she told CNN. She’ll take her samples and use strong acids to dissolve them before using a process called calibrated chemistry to isolate various elements that make up the rock.

“Then I can start to think about the origin of this rock, how it evolved over time, what kind of parent body it came from, and where in the solar system that parent body formed,” Valdes said. “Those are kind of the big questions that we try to address.”