Meteorite That Crashed Into Michigan Contains 'Pristine' Organic Compounds - Gizmodo

“As soon as you get water, the metal starts to rust, and minerals like olivine get altered,” Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago and the lead author of a new paper describing the meteorite, explained in an email.

Ward and private collector Terry Boudreaux decided to quickly donate and deliver the piece, dubbed the Hamburg meteorite, to the Field Museum in Chicago.

“Hamburg is one of the very few meteorites that was quickly recovered from a frozen surface and delivered to scientific institutions, and that is what makes this meteorite remarkable.”.

In total, the team found 2,600 different organic compounds in the Hamburg meteorite.

“These compounds formed in the parent asteroid right after it formed, when it was still hot from accretion and from the decay of radioactive elements that were still present in the early solar system,” Heck explained.

Because the Hamburg meteorite was quickly recovered, it experienced minimal contamination, but Heck said the only truly uncontaminated samples will be those collected directly from asteroids, such as the samples recently scooped up by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 probe.