Hunting for those great balls of fire

Asteroid 2018LA disintegrated over Botswana

DR RONNIE Mckenzie knew he was close. Strewn across the bush were dead antelope, while locals were talking about a big bang that rattled their houses.

But being close wasn’t enough. Mckenzie never did find the culprit that killed those antelope and shook up the locals.

“We were within 30km away, but we ran out of both time and money,” recalls Mckenzie.

What he was chasing was a meteorite that in 2009 was spotted blazing across the southern African night sky.

Mckenzie tracked the meteorite’s probable final destination to a corner of Botswana close to the borders of South Africa and Zimbabwe.

There he searched, and wore out his vehicle, as he criss-crossed the thick bush. He even got the assistance of the then Botswanan president, Ian Seretse Khama. With witness reports of a loud explosion, he knew he had got close. The antelope, he believes, probably died of fright.

Nine years later and another meteorite was spotted cutting across the night sky, but this time it was being tracked.

Last weekend a meteorite was spotted in North West heading into Botswana.

What it was was a boulder-sized asteroid called 2018LA that Nasa spotted just before it ploughed into the earth.

The space agency sighted the asteroid near the moon’s orbit early on Saturday morning.

For eight hours they tracked it as it headed to earth. They initially speculated that the impact zone would be somewhere between New Guinea and southern Africa.

Nasa later narrowed it down to southern Africa and confirmed that it had disintegrated over Botswana.

This is apparently the third occasion that scientists have spotted an incoming asteroid heading to earth. It happened before in 2008 and 2014. Nasa said it was a good training exercise for when a bigger asteroid headed our way.

CCTV footage shot on a farm which is close to the Botswana border showed a fiery ball moving over the horizon and then flaring up just out of sight. There was speculation that the footage marked the spot where the asteroid broke up, but Mckenzie warned that it is a common mistake.

“People who see the fireball disappearing over the horizon think that that is where it lands, but it could be hundreds of kilometres away,” says Mckenzie.

This time he doesn’t plan to head out to find where the asteroid broke up. Although he wouldn’t be surprised if other meteorite collectors are already hunting for the site. There is good incentive to do so, even though it is illegal.

“You could get a minimum of $2 (about R26) a gram depending on what type of meteor it is,” explains Mckenzie.

Botswana, like South Africa, has laws preventing people from picking up meteor fragments. Permits are required. But this doesn’t stop meteorites ending up being sold on the internet.

Still, it comes down to finding the site where the meteorite landed.

For years scientists have tried to find ways of doing this. Astronomer Trevor Gould doesn’t know of anyone in South Africa working out the impact site of a meteorite from studying its trajectory.

“We tend to rely on people coming across these things and picking them up,” Gould says. “These things can tell us what was happening before the sun was even formed.”

But finding this latest asteroid will come down to tracking the moment the object broke up in the sky, Mckenzie believes. If he found that location, he said he might join the search.

“I would be waiting for the report of anyone saying they heard the noise or felt the vibration, then you know you are close.

“If I heard that I might contact the Botswana government and think of going up,” says Mckenzie.