Well I've gone and done it...... booked a room for a couple of nights at the Marsden Hotel. I will be joining a bonafide official search for pieces of the Saskatchewan Meteor that fell just South of Lloydminster last November 20, how cool is that? The search is being conducted by the University Of Calgary and are calling for volunteers... Read more
Title: A first look at the petrography of the Buzzard Coulee (H4) chondrite, a recently observed fall from Saskatchewan. Authors: M. L. Hutson, A. M. Ruzicka, E. P. Milley, and A. R. Hildebrand
On November 20, 2008 a bright fireball was observed across the three Canadian Prairie provinces. Between November 27 and December 6, 2008 more than one hundred individual pieces of this fall were recovered in Saskatchewan, Canada. Here we briefly discuss the classification of this meteorite, which has been officially named Buzzard Coulee (M. Weisberg, pers. comm.). We also describe some notable features observed in this meteorite.
Security-camera footage from a gas station and motel has proven to be the best tool for learning the origins of a 15-tonne asteroid that lit up the Prairie sky Nov. 20. As the asteroid broke apart, it became a giant fireball visible from northern Alberta to Manitoba. Searchers have found pieces in an area southeast of Lloydminster, Sask., specifically on a slough called Buzzard Coulee.
Researchers from the University of Calgary studying a meteor that lit up the night sky in November are using footage captured on a CTV Edmonton security camera to try and calculate the path of the fireball. Alan Hildebrand and his research partner found fragments of the meteorite in Lloydminster almost a months after it fell to the ground.
Four billion years doesnt feel like much when you hold it in your hand. It doesnt look like much, either. Its a coal-black lump of rock thats just a few centimetres in diameter. Its feather-light, weighing about as much as a loonie. But this rock is about 4.6 billion years old, says Murray Paulson, an amateur astronomer in St. Albert. On Nov. 20 it came screaming out of the heavens at about 50,400 kilometres an hour, part of a 10-tonne meteorite the size of an office desk that lit up the Alberta sky as a blazing fireball.
The collection of meteorite pieces collected from the frozen wilderness near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border is expected to help set a Canadian record, researchers say. Researchers and volunteers were able to recover about 130 meteorites from the site 15 km southwest of Lloydminster before the recent snowfall covered the ground.
Some of my favourite newspaper columns are the ones I didn't write. Consider, for example, the column I recently didn't write about the great meteorite, the disintegrated remains of which spectacularly fell to Earth the other week near Lloydminster. Scientists and treasure hunters by the hundreds promptly descended on the remote scene in hopes of finding fragments. By triangulating independent observations of the fireball, they reportedly had narrowed down the search area to about 10 square miles. Even so, I doubted they'd find so much as a particle. Ten square miles is a vast area to search for bits of blackened rock. In an area that size, you'd be lucky to find your way back to the car. Read more