Overview
- A fireball that streaked past New York on July 16, 2024 produced a sonic boom and a fragment crashed through a Hillsborough, New Jersey roof before an amateur astronomer promptly recovered the pieces.
- Trajectory reconstruction from regional camera networks and Doppler radar traced the rock back to a low region of the asteroid belt, helping constrain its likely parent-body source.
- Laboratory work published in Science Advances identifies the specimen as a rare intermediate CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, one of only two witnessed falls of that subtype.
- Analyses found tiny salt-rich inclusions and sodium deposits interpreted as the residue of concentrated brines that once flowed near the parent asteroid’s surface, and researchers are still pinning down the exact salt minerals.
- The meteorite also contains a broad suite of soluble organic compounds and numerous amino acids, fragments are now curated at the American Museum of Natural History, and teams are comparing Hillsborough with Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx samples to refine formation pathways and implications for delivery of prebiotic chemistry to early Earth.