This landowner obviously realized that nearly everyone has the unfortunate urge to hammer on strange rocks.
Of course, there have been exceptions to the respectful treatment of meteorites seen to fall. The finder of one fragment of the Zhovtnevy Hutor, Russia, fall tossed it into the stove, and a farm woman lost another by throwing it at an unruly horse. A peasant who thought meteorites possessed miraculous powers powdered up a piece of the diamond-bearing Novo-Urei, Russia, stone and ate it!
A polished and etched face of the Lake Murray meteorite. The length of the cut is a good 23 inches.
7. LANDMARKS, SKYMARKS & DETECTORS
The chemist can easily obtain materials for his research work from reliable supply houses. The meteoriticist (as a scientist who studies meteors and meteorites is known), is not this lucky. He must search for the specimens he wishes to investigate wherever they may have landed on the wide, wide earth. This “needle-in-a-haystack” problem could rarely be solved if it were not for certain mathematical and instrumental aids that swing the balance in favor of the meteorite hunter. When meteorites are seen to fall, these aids can be brought into play only if certain information is supplied by eyewitnesses of the falls. For this reason, everyone ought to be acquainted with the facts about meteorite falls that scientists will need to know in order to make finds, and should understand how these facts must be reported in order to be of maximum use to field parties.[5]
The problem of working out the path a fireball has followed in the sky boils down to this. The investigating scientists must be able to fix the position in space of certain important points on the fireball’s path. This idea of fixing points is not really difficult at all. Suppose, to take an analogy from baseball, we have base runners on first and third. These two players are intently watching their team’s clean-up hitter, who is “crowding the plate.” Consequently their lines of sight intersect at home plate and give a very good “fix on” its position, as navigators say. This is the way a fix can be obtained in two dimensions; that is, essentially, in the plane of the earth’s surface.
A. A fix determined in two dimensions. The lines of sight of the runners on first and third intersect at x.
B. A fix determined in three dimensions. The lines of sight of the runners on the first and third intersect at x.