The Moroccan Sahara Desert. Photo: ruben i/Flickr
In the early morning of July 18th, 2011, something unusual happened in eastern Morocco. The sky lit up, glowing and changing colors. They couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but a few well-placed nomads were experiencing something that’s only happened a handful of times in recorded history: They were witnessing the terrestrial arrival of a piece of Mars.
The Meteoritical Society’s bulletin reads like a police report:
“At about 2 am local time on July 18, 2011, a bright fireball was observed by several people in the region of the Oued Drâa valley, east of Tata, Morocco. One eyewitness, Mr Aznid Lhou, reported that it was at first yellow in color, and then turned green illuminating all the area before it appeared to split into two parts. Two sonic booms were heard over the valley. In October 2011, nomads began to find very fresh, fusion-crusted stones in a remote area of the Oued Drâa intermittent watershed, centered about 50 km ESE of Tata and 48 km SSW of Tissint village, in the vicinity of the Oued El Gsaïb drainage and also near El Ga’ïdat plateau known as Hmadat Boû Rba’ ine.”
It’s unclear what “several people” were doing awake at 2 AM, but their unusual morning was just the beginning. In the coming months, meteorite prospectors, collectors, and scientists would travel the world in a high stakes quest to acquire a most unusual chunk of rock.
Sporting a crisp blue blazer and an even crisper London accent, Dr. Caroline Smith, the curator of meteorites at London’s Natural History Museum, gave an account of what transpired at the recent Conference on Life Detection in Extraterrestrial Samples. As word spread of the charred blobs of rock turning up around Tissint, French meteorite hunter Luc Labenne pounced. Labenne is one of the key players in the lucrative business of meteorite collecting: he operates reconnaissance expeditions to the Sahara every year and hawks the spoils online (where the lunar meteorite Dhofar 457 is going for $150,000).
Labenne tapped into his network of informants (rumor has it he has trained local nomads to recognize meteorites) and acquired most of the meteorite. Like any veteran meteorite hunter, Labenne paid out of pocket for some initial analysis, sending a couple of grams of the material to laboratories in France and the U.S. Compositional results showed that the meteorite was from Mars.
And that changed everything.
Martian meteorites are a rare breed: of the 53000 meteorites that have been officially cataloged on Earth, just 104 are martian, a provenance confirmed by the composition of trapped gas – which matches measurements made by the Viking Lander – and mineralogical traits. Add in the rapid turnaround from impact to discovery (which minimizes the ability of potential contamination to seep into the meteorite), and Labenne knew he was sitting on a gold mine.
Ultimately, the largest chunk of the Tissint meteorite – weighing in at 1.1 kg – went up for sale in New York City. Wealthy collectors lined up, but the vendor, Darryl Pitt, was holding out for a museum buyer, hoping to save the precious specimen for science and public appreciation.
Of course, Pitt doesn’t run a charity, and he gave London’s Natural History Museum a chance to take the rock off his hands, for a fair price. This undisclosed amount of money was far more than the Museum had allocated for sample acquisition, but a last minute call from a wealthy anonymous donor (known enigmatically as “an American gentleman living in England”) flipped Smith’s fortunes. “This is the most pristine specimen of Mars that we have,” she said, “quite possibly the most important meteorite of the last 100 years.”
And with that, Smith and her team flew to New York, collected the meteorite, and scurried back to London just hours later. Back in South Kensington, Smith crossed Cromwell Road and wedged past throngs of schoolchildren, Tissint wrapped tightly in her backpack.
Of course, the real question is what’s inside Tissint. Approximately 100 grams of the meteorite will be distributed in 15-20 gram aliquots to laboratories around the world in the coming months. Will investigations yield tantalizing whiffs of potential life like its planetary brethren ALH84001? Is there an even more convincing biological smoking gun inside?
All we know for now is that, thanks to Moroccan nomads, Darryl Pitt, and a mysterious American donor, scientists will at least have the chance to find out.
