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Meteorite on Board
Photograph by Robert E. Peary, National Geographic
On Friday, asteroid 2012 DA14 will buzz Earth. Experts estimate that it will miss us by about 27,700 kilometers (17,200 miles)—closer than most satellites orbit the Earth's surface.
If it hits, which experts assure us it won't, it wouldn't be the first big hunk of space material to end up on Earth.The American Museum of Natural History in New York lays claim to the biggest meteorite currently in captivity.
That meteorite is composed of iron and is 11 feet (3 meters) long, 7 feet (2 meters) high, 6 feet (1.8 meters) thick, and weighs 34 tons.
Explorer Robert Peary brought it back from Cape York, Greenland, in 1897. He was looking for a way to the North Pole and learned about three meteorites from the local Inuit people. The local tradition held that they were an Inuit woman and her dog and tent that Tornarsuk, the Evil Spirit, had hurled from the sky.
The Inuit had been hacking off pieces of the galactic iron for about a thousand years to make knives and other pointed objects, said curator Genevieve LeMoine at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College.
By the time Peary got to them, the woman had lost much of her bulk to tools, but the tent was still mammoth.
Peary called this largest meteorite Ahnighito, hisdaughter's middle name. The local Inuit called it Saviksoah, or "the great iron."
The locals were getting most of their tools from trade at that point, so Peary thought it would be okay to take their meteorites back with him to New York and sell them to a museum to fund further expeditions.
He tried to move them in 1896. He succeeded with the other two but couldn't get the largest onto the boat.
He wrote in his book Northward Over the "Great Ice": "The inherent deviltry of inanimate objects was never more strikingly illustrated than in this monster. Had the matter been a subject of study for weeks by the celestial forge-master, I doubt that any shape could have been devised that would have been any more completely ill suited for handling in any way, either rolling or sliding or lifting."
Here it's being loaded a year later with winches on board the whaler Hope.
—Johnna Rizzo
Published February 15, 2013
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Heave Ho!
Photograph by Robert E. Peary, National Geographic
Peary paid locals—here in sealskin jackets and polar bear skin pants—with rifles, pots and pans, saws, and knives to heave the meteorite across the island to the boat. Here they heft a hundred-ton jack. Peary's 60-ton jack, "a second-hand affair," gave out after the first attempt to lift the meteorite from the dirt.
Published February 15, 2013
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Engineering Feat
Photograph by Robert E. Peary, National Geographic
Peary was a skilled engineer but credits his engineer brother-in-law Emil Diebitsch with the master plan of rolling the meteorites along wooden planks (here on the ground near the one Peary called Ahnighito) across the ice to the ship. Ropes and winches hauled the meteorites up over the side.
Published February 15, 2013
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Closing the Deal
Photograph by Robert E. Peary, National Geographic
In 1909, 22 years after Peary carried the meteorite off to New York, his wife Josephine (pictured here with their daughter Marie Ahnighito) finally convinced Mrs. Morris K. Jessup, wife of a past president of the American Museum of Natural History, to buy it. Josephine needed the money to send a ship back up to Greenland to retrieve her husband.
Published February 15, 2013
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From Space to Sea
Photograph from Bowdoin College/National Geographic
When the meteorite was finally aboard—more than a year after his crew began prying it out of the ground—Peary said of it, "It was as if the demon of the 'Saviksoah' had fought a losing fight, accepted the result, and yielded gracefully. The congratulations that evening in the cabin of the Hope were numerous and earnest."
Published February 15, 2013
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New Photos: Meteorite Hits Russia
Photograph from Chelyabinsk Region Police Department/AFP/Getty Images
Published February 15, 2013
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