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The Nautilus Exploration Vessel spends Monday off the coast of Washington State with a NASA scientist on board in search of pieces of meteorites from the largest fall of space rocks for decades
. in the Pacific Sea about 25 km off Washington after briefly lighting up the sky like a fireball (see video below) on the evening of March 7th.
NASA scientist Marc Fries is on the Ocean Exploration Trust's non-profit E / V Nautilus Trust, which takes a look at the bottom of the sea in a section of the National Marine Sanctuary of the Olympic coast. It is there that the radar saw the cosmic debris splash.
A team also deploys the Argus and Hercules remote-controlled vehicles. These vehicles are equipped with custom magnetized chopsticks to pick up the meteorites and carry them over the water for closer inspection.
The entire mission, which is also supported by National Geographic, started around 9 am Monday. should last up to 16 hours PT. It is broadcast online via the integrated video above.
After a few hours of mission, Hercules had already picked up potentially interesting objects from the seabed for further examination. Fries said during the webcast that they were in an area of the fall where he was expecting to find pieces of meteors the size of a brick. This would be the first time that a meteorite has been recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
Earlier, Fries told the Northwest News Network that he was expecting to find something on the seabed with the help of a sonar and a magnetometer aboard the Nautilus.
"Meteorites have a spectacular scientific value," said Fries. "The radar data seems to show that this thing is mechanically harder – it's a harder piece of rock – than the other meteorite falls we've seen so far." It's something different. "
mission that the recovery of the fragments of this fall" will provide valuable information about the threat posed by asteroids with terrestrial orbits. "
All fragments that the team finds will be examined and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC
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