by Diana Andrade
Why do we need to protect the extraterrestrial fragments that fall through here
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Recently, the Brazilian meteorite community was surprised with the classification of a new national meteorite. The 4.5 kilogram fragment, named after the city where it was found, Socorro, in the interior of Pernambuco, officially entered the Meteoritical Bulletin (a database with information about new meteorites in the world) on October 31 of 2021. According to the publication, the rock was found in 2019 by a farmer who did not want to be identified, and who at first did not suspect the extraterrestrial origin of his find. In August 2020, however, due to the fall of another meteorite in the city of Santa Filomena, also in Pernambuco, he became aware of the importance of these space fragments and decided to send the piece to a relative who lives in Miami, in the United States. There, it was bought by American Michael Farmer, one of the biggest meteorite traders in the world. Farmer sent a twenty-gram piece to researcher Carl Agee of the University of New Mexico for analysis and classification. After the results, he resold his purchase to an anonymous collector for $800,000.
Meteorites are fragments of celestial bodies that come naturally to us. Sometimes called the “poor man’s space probe”, since they fall free in our “backyard”, most of them come from the Main Asteroid Belt, a wide strip between Mars and Jupiter. Carriers of fundamental information about the formation of our solar system, they can give us clues about the physical-chemical conditions at the time of the birth of our planetary system, as well as about its evolution. Some, rarer, can come from the Moon, Mars and even the remains of comets, about which they bring us direct data. These are objects that roam our planetary system, but due to disturbances they can change their route and end up colliding with the Earth.
The Relief is a fragment from Mars that the University of New Mexico classified as a shergottito marciano, that is, a sample of that planet. Only 263 meteorites of this type are known worldwide, making it a rarity. There is no other similar in Brazil, either for scientific study or to be exhibited in universities or museums. Having such a piece is equivalent to having an object captured by a probe sent to Mars. Needless to say, his departure from the country represented a loss the size of a bolide.
Unfortunately, so far there is no law that prevents these space tourists from leaving the national territory, and therefore there is no way to recover such a rare and enormous treasure. It is not the first time that Brazilian meteorites have been sent abroad before our scientists can study them and before Brazilian institutions can decide whether they want to keep them.
The commercialization of Socorro is yet another episode that reinforces the need to create laws that protect this heritage of enormous scientific importance for the academic community. In order to present a solution to the problem, a commission was created, made up of specialists from different Brazilian institutions, which seeks to present to our governments a bill to be voted urgently.
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Diana Andrade is a researcher at the Laboratory of Spatial Material Analysis (LAMEsp) at the Valongo Observatory/UFRJ.
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