Shaken up, one of the boys ran inside to report that somebody was throwing rocks at the group, Monahans police Capt. Dave Watts said.
Parents called a local radio station and the police were notified, but not because anybody really feared a nasty rock-throwing neighbor.
"The sky was falling, like Chicken Little," Watts said.
"We took a radiation test of it, and didn't get anything. It didn't glow in the dark and the officer's hands didn't fall off, so we figured it was safe," he said. "We didn't handle it any more than necessary, though."
By morning, news of the bombardment had spread across the country. In Houston word reached Everett Gibson, a geochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center who has spent his career studying lunar samples and meteorites. Gibson called out to west Texas and learned that a second chunk had been found that morning, a rock slightly heavier than the first find, embedded in the pavement of a city street.
Gibson went straight to the airport.
He made it to Monahans by midday, and verified the two fresh meteorites, the second one slightly heavier than the first. He decided that it was crucial to get a piece of the rock into the laboratory as soon as possible.
Showdown In Town
For many reasons, getting a meteorite into the lab is a race against time. One of the things Gibson wanted to study in the meteorite was the radiation environment of space. Because many of the clues about this environment begin to dissipate as soon as a rock enters the protective cloak of Earth's atmosphere, Gibson was in a hurry.
But by late afternoon factions in the town were saying, "not so fast."
A dispute had broken out in the town over who owned the meteorite. The owners of the property nearest the spot where the first piece hit claimed it for their own. The city argued that the meteorite had fallen in public property along a roadside. The families of the boys who witnessed the fall had gotten involved. The boys, who would later be known as the Monahans 7, thought they deserved to split it. Meteorite dealers from out of state were hanging around. Researchers from Arizona had arrived.
A city council meeting happened to be scheduled for that afternoon, and Gibson appeared to plead his case. There was no telling how the town would react to Gibson, who was, at least technically, an agent of the federal government.
"I went before the city council of Monahans asking could we at NASA borrow the sample for a period of time to be able to do the scientific study of it very quickly. And they voted unanimously to allow us to borrow the specimen."
Gibson left town with the Monahans packed in a plastic bag.
It's Alive!
Within 47 hours of its landing, the meteorite was 60 feet below ground at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, in a radiation-shielded laboratory built to study the lunar samples from the Apollo missions, Gibson and his team analyzed what are called radio nuclides.
After running several tests the members of the team took out the rock to examine it and were shocked, Gibson said.
"We looked at it and surprise, surprise: We found this violet, purple-colored spot on the face of this rock where a piece had been broken off during the landing. We saw this purple violet mineral on it which was very unusual, and we got to looking at it and we suddenly saw other areas around it that were turning orange-brown. It looked like they were rusting."
Right before their eyes, Gibson said, the meteorite seemed to be changing, and they realized they had a unique sample.
"We had a sample that had been in space, in the vacuum of space, that once it arrived here on Earth, it was undergoing alterations very quickly." The blue crystal turned out to be salt turned violet by the intense radiation of space. Scientists have long sought but never found salt in meteorites. The salt, common table salt, or halite, was not the only surprise. Gazing though the clear salt crystals with electron microscopes, the group saw tiny bubbles called inclusions. They didn't know for certain, but guessed the inclusions were filled with some kind of water.
They enlisted the help of a specialist at Virginia Tech who studies inclusions in the crystals of terrestrial rocks. He found the inclusions were indeed filled with liquid, and that the liquid was a salty water.
The Luck of the Drop
"We had never found salt crystal before and then bingo. For the first time we had a sample of extraterrestrial water too," Gibson said, "And the only reason we discovered it is that we were able to have it and study it very quickly. It makes us wonder how many other samples have fallen that have undergone change or degradation after they fell that we missed."
Indeed, some researchers believe salts and water could be very common, and if meteorites could be found and delivered to laboratories as quickly as Monahans was, scientists may be able to learn much more about early chemistry in the solar system.
The researchers kept a small chunk of the rock for science, and scraped a few crystals of salt from Monahans before returning it to the town for which it was named.
Although surveyors determined that both meteorites fell on public property, the city let the boys who witnessed the fall keep the rock. They later sold it to a meteorite collector for close to $27,000 said Capt. Watts of the Monahans police department.
The City kept the second piece, and had a replica made. City workers removed the asphalt of the street where the meteorite landed, and placed the pavement on display at the Monahans City Hall. The meteorite mock up now rests in the original crater. The city kept a small sample of the meteorite, which is also on display, but traded the main fragment to a collection at Arizona State University. In return, the university gave Monahans the original iron meteorite that fell in the town in 1939. That piece is now also on display in city hall.
"In some cases it's a win-win-win situation," Gibson assessed. "The scientific community has a sample, the kids got something monetary from it, the citizens have a display, and we have an interesting bit of scientific information about our early solar system.
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