Four small stones picked up off farmland north of Masterton have been confirmed as New Zealand’s 11th meteorite, and only the fourth ever collected here after somebody actually watched it fall. The fragments weigh 8 grams, 9 grams, 12 grams and 40 grams. The largest is roughly the size of a walnut. It is, by the reckoning of the scientists who found it, about 4.6 billion years old.
The rock that produced them entered the atmosphere at 10.26pm on Tuesday 28 July, and for a few seconds it turned the bottom of the North Island into daylight. People from Kāpiti across to Masterton reported a brilliant white streak breaking into pieces overhead. Moments later came the sound, described by one Wairarapa resident as multiple crackles, several distinct booms and a prolonged rolling rumble. The recovery was reported by 1News on Thursday 6 August, after several days of searching.
What made the search possible was not luck. It was a nationwide grid of cheap cameras pointed at the sky. Fireballs Aotearoa, a citizen science project run as a section of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand and directed by Professor James Scott, has been quietly building that grid since February 2022. It started with six Raspberry Pi meteor cameras. Within a year of a University of Otago team taking over production and distribution there were 77 of them installed, and a year after that 148, bolted to schools, observatories, astronomical society sheds and a good many ordinary houses. When something bright crosses the sky, several cameras see it from different angles, and a trajectory can be calculated backwards through the atmosphere and forwards to the ground.
That calculation produced a search area on farmland north of Masterton, which is where a team including Victoria University of Wellington PhD student Liam McGovern spent several days walking paddocks with their eyes down. McGovern found the 40 gram piece, the biggest of the four.
“I was shaking afterwards, because I’ve spent the last six years of my life studying these rocks,” he told 1News. “From a laboratory perspective I’ve handled a lot of meteorites before, but actually going and collecting one was really unreal.”
Bruce Charlier, who manages the geochemistry laboratory at Victoria University of Wellington, was part of the search and explained why the distinction matters so much to the people who study these things. “There’s now been 11 confirmed meteorites in total, but there’s a difference between a find and a fall,” he said. “A find is something that’s lain on the ground for hundreds or even thousands of years, whereas a fall is something that’s actually observed to fall and then collected straight away. There’s only been four of those in New Zealand.”
A fall is scientifically far more valuable because the rock has not had decades or centuries of New Zealand rain working through it. It is close to the condition it was in when it left space, and because the cameras recorded its path, its orbit before it arrived can be reconstructed. That means the scientists can say roughly which part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter it came from, which is not something you can do with a weathered stone found in a paddock by a farmer.
The earlier witnessed falls are thin on the ground and well spaced. In November 1908 a daylight meteor and a sonic boom over Taranaki ended with two pieces recovered from a small crater at Mokoia and handed to the museum in Whanganui. In June 2004 a stone came through the roof of a house in the Auckland suburb of Ellerslie, bounced off a leather couch, hit the ceiling and came to rest on the floor of a room where a grandchild had been playing minutes earlier. Then in March 2024 a fireball over the South Island led searchers to an 810 gram stone near Lake Tekapo within half an hour of the public search starting, which became the country’s 10th confirmed meteorite and the first in 20 years. Two years later the network has produced another one. Te Ara records the rest as finds rather than falls, stones noticed years or centuries after they landed.
Fireballs Aotearoa’s Steve Wyn-Harris said the rock had been moving at 14 kilometres a second before it hit the atmosphere, and that “this speed represents what it has been travelling at for millions of years around the Sun”. Scott put the age plainly. “The rock is therefore certainly from the start of the Solar System and almost 4.6 billion years old,” he said. It is older than the Earth it landed on, which is a strange thing to be able to say about something small enough to sit in your palm.
The fragments will now go through formal classification, a process that establishes the meteorite’s type and composition and ends with an official name being registered internationally. Convention is to name it after a nearby geographic feature, so a Wairarapa name is likely. There is a small historical echo there. The first meteorite recorded in this country, a chondrite listed in the international catalogue as Wairarapa Valley, dates from 1863 and came from the same district.
Charlier had advice for anyone who fancies their chances of adding to the tally. The inside of a fresh meteorite is pale, he said, but the outside carries a giveaway. “The exterior usually has this very diagnostic fusion crust, which is usually black or very dark,” he said, the thin glassy skin melted on during the fall. “If you think you’ve got something that is out of the ordinary, and it has this black fusion crust, then I would definitely seek an expert opinion on it.”
The wider point is that the country has gone from stumbling across space rocks by accident to hunting them deliberately, and getting results. “We’re really good at spotting them now,” Charlier said. “If there’s something inbound, we’re very likely going to see it.” Two nights before the Wairarapa fireball, another one crossed the eastern South Island and triggered a full emergency response near Oamaru from a caller who reasonably thought they had seen an aircraft go into the sea. Nothing was found from that one. This time, the cameras did their job and four small pieces of the early Solar System are now sitting in a laboratory in Wellington.
Did you see the fireball on the night of 28 July, or hear the booms that followed it? Tell us what it was like in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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