Three European tourists have been detained in Sudan for acquiring the remnants of a rare meteorite that hit a remote region in 2008, their lawyer said. Lawyer Adil Yacoub Ahmed says the tourists, two from France and the other from Belgium, were arrested 500 kilometres north of the capital Khartoum. Read more
Sudanese police said on Tuesday they had arrested two European tourists for collecting fragments of an asteroid from the country's northern desert without permission. The tourists, from France and Belgium, found pieces of an asteroid that crashed to earth in the Abu-Hamad area of Sudan's remote Northern state, said a statement published by Sudan's interior ministry. Read more
Dana Perino told a story Friday about perhaps the most unusual email she received while serving as press secretary for President George W. Bush. It arrived 9:30 one night, from NASA, with "HEADS UP" in the subject line. It warned that an asteroid was headed toward Sudan.
"Asteroids usually break up. But the email asked us to call the Sudanese and let them know it's coming" - Dana Perino Read more
The asteroid that crashed in northern Sudan last year was shaped like a loaf of walnut-raisin bread, according to astronomer Peter Scheirich and colleagues at Ondrejov Observatory and Charles University in the Czech Republic. Scheirich reported his findings at the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Puerto Rico on October 5, 2009 in a special session dedicated to this asteroid one year after the fall.
Planetary scientists have reported a slew of new findings about the first asteroid ever spotted before pieces of it fell to Earth. The space rock contained a number of amino acids, had a flattened shape and appears to have been blasted off the surface of a larger body, researchers reported October 5 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Societys Division for Planetary Sciences. Read more
The asteroid that crashed in northern Sudan last year was shaped like a loaf of walnut-raisin bread, according to astronomer Peter Scheirich and colleagues at Ondrejov Observatory and Charles University in the Czech Republic. Scheirich reported his findings at the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Puerto Rico, which on October 5 dedicated a special session to this asteroid, "From the Heavens to the Earth: The 2008 TC3 / Almahata Sitta Ureilite Fall." Source
On October 7, 2008, shortly before dawn in northern Sudan, a trucker named Omar Fadul el Mula was praying at a remote teahouse in the Nubian Desert when a bright flash lit up the landscape. It was as if the world had switched from night to day. He sprung to his feet, ran around the small building, and saw a huge trail of dust and debris stretched high in the sky. Read more
WORKSHOP ON ASTEROID 2008 TC3 University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan Dec 5-15, 2009
The University of Khartoum, Faculty of Sciences and Physics Department, and the SETI Institute invite planetary astronomers and meteoriticists to participate in a workshop dedicated to asteroid 2008 TC3. Asteroid 2008 TC3 was the first asteroid to be detected in space and subsequently found to impact the Earth. Fragments were recovered in the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan in the form of rare ureilite meteorites, called "Almahata Sitta". Goal of the workshop is to discuss the results from ongoing research into the properties of asteroid 2008 TC3 when it was still in space, its nature and origin, the asteroid's impact in Earth's atmosphere, the subsequent recovery, and the analysis of the recovered meteorites. Talks on the origin of ureilites are invited, as well as discussions on how to adjust observing strategies to increase the likelihood of future discoveries of small asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
