The Kimbolton meteorite is one of just nine found in New Zealand. Jimmy Ellingham visits its home at Massey University in Palmerston North for a look.
Georg Zellmer, left, and Vince Neall are custodians of the Kimbolton meteorite. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
As a Manawatū farm worker was harrowing a field in 1976 a rock caught in his equipment.
Ray De Rose, who worked on a Hereford cattle stud of about 38 hectares, threw it to one side and continued.
On the next pass it caught again so he took to it with a sledgehammer and, not knowing what it was, smashed it into about 20 pieces.
Massey Emeritus Professor in earth science Vince Neall said the rock - and then its fragments - interested Ray's son, Ronald.
"He went to the paddock and he gathered as many of the pieces as he could together and subsequently glued them back into the form they originally had, into one object."
Ronald De Rose studied earth science at the university.
"In the 1970s one of the exercises we did with our earth science students was what we called the pet rock exercise, where they could choose any rock they wanted and we would cut a thin section and X-ray the object for them. Then they had to interpret the object."
When Ronald De Rose turned up with his glued-together 7.5kg rock, about the size of a rugby ball, Neall and his colleagues knew it was a meteorite.
They sent it to a New Zealand expert, who said it was not. But, undeterred, Neall put to good use a contact and sent a sample to Dr Carleton Moore, director of the Meteorite Research Centre in Arizona.
A plaster cast that has been made of the Kimbolton meteorite. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
Named after a post office
He confirmed it was a meteorite and guided Massey staff through the process of registering it.
"I asked Carleton what is the format for naming these meteorites," Neall said.
"He said that the tradition has been to name them after the nearest post office and hence this became the Kimbolton meteorite."
Neall said the field where it fell was about 5km away from the town. Kimbolton is about 27km northeast of Feilding.
Known as a chondrite or stony meteorite it would have fallen from somewhere in our solar system some time in the past 10,000 years, a date reached after analysing soil layers in the area.
The Kimbolton one has been sliced into thirds, with one third sent to the Canterbury Museum collection.
When RNZ visited the Massey earth science department one of the segments was made available for inspection, as well as a plaster cast of the original. It was made by Neall's wife, who is an artist.
It's thought that Ray and Ronald De Rose's find was part of the meteorite, but subsequent searches didn't uncover anything else in the nearby area.
It is though forever associated with Ronald De Rose, who died in 2013.
His brother, Kevin, said he was proud of his discovery.
Kevin, who was working on a potato farm nearby, remembers the day his father came across the meteorite, and how he helped him smash it with a 20-pound hammer.
"We were wondering what it was. We thought, 'Oh yeah, we'll see how hard this is.' It was a very unusual colour, being a black colour with a lot of metal flecks and specks.
"We thought there was nothing special about it. It was only because Ronald was doing his Bachelor of earth science [degree] and his study at Massey that he took in a piece of it."
Looking back it was something special for Ronald De Rose and the family, Kevin said.
Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
One of nine
The Kimbolton meteorite is the eighth discovered in New Zealand.
Since 1976 there's only been one further find, when one crashed into an Auckland living room in 2004.
Neall said a famous one landed near Mokoia, south Taranaki, in 1908.
"The boom was heard in New Plymouth and right across the waters of the Whanganui River.
"The curator of the Whanganui Museum went out to Mokoia and looked around, searching for pieces. He found two that had hit a tree and were stuck in the splintered wood of the tree."
Massey Professor in earth and planetary sciences Georg Zellmer said finds such as the Kimbolton meteorite helped people understand the origins of our solar system.
The metals in it formed during the solar nebula from which the Sun and planets formed.
"It's pretty clear that the rock itself is 4.5 billion years old... It's an old rock. It entered the Earth's atmosphere and most of it probably burned during its travel down to the surface."
A section of the Kimbolton meteorite showing its composition while the coin gives the context of its size. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
Zellmer said every year about two or three finds were brought to the university department, but they always turned out not to be meteorites.
Neall said one giveaway is if they're warm to touch, they're probably metal slag from a furnace or something similar.
Meteorites, such as the one found in Manawatū, were cool by the time they reached the surface.