How to Name a Meteor
To the casual visitor, Washington County is a rural place with restaurants that close early and more trees than people by a factor of about 100,000 to 1, and it is. But it’s also a place where you might start your week thinking about laundry and end it thinking about cosmic space dust.
April showers gave way to a week of clear blue skies, and thank heaven for that because, without them, dozens of Downeasters might have missed seeing shards of space rock flaming across the skies of Washington County on Saturday, April 8.
I was idly scrolling through Facebook while waiting to board the F/V Tara Ann in Bucks Harbor when I said aloud, “Huh, lots of people are saying they saw something fall from the sky,” at which point young Marissa Wood turned to her mother and said, “I told you I saw something, Mom!”
Just what Marissa and many others saw was a mystery for some hours, and one made temporarily even more interesting when Facebook shut down commenting on Erin Watson’s post about her sighting, which had kicked off a blitz of comments from others who saw and felt something, too. For a short time, we didn’t only have mysterious sky sightings but someone trying to silence them [insert Men In Black theories here].
Then the commenting issue was corrected, and we were back to the plain mystery of something hurtling loudly through Downeast airspace, which we now know was a bolide meteor, the first ever tracked by radar in Maine.
In my day job, I wrote four stories about the meteor last week, twice interviewing the NASA meteor scientist, who also happens to curate the Johnson Space Center’s Cosmic Dust Collection.
It was also the week I saw my first kayak-topped out-of-state car enjoying a slow roll up the Port Road, maybe after a visit to Jasper Beach. This is always the time of year our seasonal visitors start to return, but we might see more than usual in the coming weeks, thanks to the meteor.
Now that news of the Washington County fireball has spread nationwide, NASA’s Dr. Marc Fries says we can expect a bevy of professional and amateur meteorite hunters. In fact, some have already arrived. Mud season will deter their progress for a while, but not for long. They all want a piece of the space rock, and Fries says that’s because meteorites capture the imagination, leftover as they are from the very formation of our solar system and older than anything on Earth.
They’re also valuable.
If you found a little piece, you could keep it or sell it to a collector. Or, if you found a large piece (more than 2.2 pounds), you could hand it over to the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum in Bethel and claim their $25,000 reward.
Your find would be in good company there, living out its days alongside the largest piece of Mars on Earth, and that’s not all. By donating it to a reputable scientific collection, you could have a crack at naming last weekend’s meteor event, following The Meteoritical Society’s Guidelines for Meteorite Nomenclature, a 12-page document brought to you by the solar system’s official meteor-naming entity.
And you thought cosmic space dust was exciting. (For the record, me too.)
The society states, "A meteorite name must be clearly distinct from all other meteorite names and abbreviations, and should convey the geographical location of the fall or find.”
NASA’s interpretation of radar data shows possible meteorites could be found across the U.S. - Canadian border, a region that once shared the geographical name of Acadia, or French Acadie, from which the National Park takes its name. But in 2020, when the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would call its new Jonesboro cemetery Acadia National, a collective groan went up Way Downeast.
Ask Samuel de Champlain where Acadia was, and sure, he might have pictured present-day Washington County. But over 400 years later, somewhere else comes to mind. So maybe Acadia isn’t the right name for our meteor. But it’s not up to me, anyway.
It’s up to whoever donates the meteor and the Meteorite Nomenclature Committee, or NomCom for short.
But first, you have to find it.
Happy hunting.