December 26, 2002
The Earth has carried you around the Sun again, steady as ever, while the stars kept their patient watch.
Searching for Meteorites in Antarctica
Birthday · December 26, 2002
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published December 26, 2002. Credit: Ralph P. Harvey (CWRU), Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, NASA, NSF. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean, are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks. At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica, huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out. These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid, yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System. Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above, ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996.
Image credit: Ralph P. Harvey (CWRU), Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, NASA, NSF