A meteorite recovered immediately after its fall to Earth on July 16, 2024 is helping NASA scientists uncover new clues about ancient water, the chemical evolution of early asteroids, and ingredients that may have helped make life possible throughout the early solar system.

This rapid recovery began when an amateur astronomer from New Jersey quickly recognized that a freshly fallen meteorite had landed on his property. Recognizing their scientific value and wearing protective gloves, he collected the fragments and stored them in aluminum foil and glass containers, which preserved delicate minerals and organic compounds that are often altered by humidity, weather and pollution.

When the meteorite fell to Earth, cameras in New Jersey captured its fiery passage through the atmosphere. Scientists used these observations to reconstruct the fireball’s trajectory and, after recovering the meteorite, combined this data with laboratory analysis to determine where in the solar system the rock was most likely to have originated. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Scientific advancesResearchers found evidence that ancient salt water altered minerals within the meteorite’s parent asteroid, preserving unique minerals and a rich inventory of organic compounds.

“When we have a documented fireball and a rapid recovery of its meteorite, we will be able to learn not only what the rock is made of, but also where it came from in the asteroid belt,” said Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, and the SETI Institute, and lead author of the study.

The Hillsborough meteorite, named after the township where it was recovered, belongs to a class of carbon-rich meteorites known as CM carbonaceous chondrites. These primitive rocks preserve some of the oldest materials in the solar system and record the chemical processes that shaped asteroids more than 4.5 billion years ago.

While examining the unusually pristine meteorite, the researchers found a mosaic of small broken rocks and noted that some contained unusually high concentrations of sodium, an unexpected finding for this type of meteorite. The surprising signal prompted more detailed investigation using powerful electron microscopes that allowed scientists to examine the meteorite from the millimeter scale down to individual atoms. By combining observations at multiple scales, the researchers reconstructed the history of the minerals and the fluids that once flowed through them.

These analyzes revealed microscopic fractures filled with sodium-rich material left by ancient brines. Unlike pure water, brines contain dissolved salts that allow them to transport elements and chemically alter the rocks through which they move. In the case of the Hillsborough sample, those ancient fluids altered the asteroid’s minerals and left chemical evidence that remained preserved for billions of years.

Scientists were also able to detect fragile sodium carbonate salts that normally react with moisture in Earth’s atmosphere before they could be studied. Jangmi Han, a co-author of the paper and a mineralogist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, identified evidence of ancient brines preserved within microscopic fractures. Similar salts were identified in samples returned from the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission and the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 mission. However, Hillsborough marks the first time salts have been identified in a CM carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, offering new insight into the surfaces of the early asteroids that produced these meteorites.

Together, these findings suggest that ancient salt-rich brines were more widespread among early asteroids than previously thought, and provide scientists with new opportunities to compare how water altered different asteroid bodies across the early solar system.

“The fragments of the most salt-rich fragments of this meteorite are quite comparable to the samples returned by the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx missions,” said Mike Zolensky, a NASA Johnson meteorite researcher and co-author of the study. “They are not identical. They are different in some very interesting ways, but they have seen very similar processes.”

Scientists expected Hillsborough to contain a rich set of organic compounds because it is a CM carbonaceous chondrite. What made the meteorite exceptional was how quickly it was recovered, allowing researchers to study those compounds before prolonged exposure to Earth’s environment could contaminate the sample.

“One of the big surprises for me when we analyzed a small fragment of the Hillsborough meteorite was the complexity of the amino acids and other organic compounds,” said Danny Glavin, senior scientist at the Astrobiology Analysis Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the study.

Its diversity of amino acids and other organic compounds is comparable to that of the Murchison meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite weighing almost 100 kilograms that fell in Australia in 1969 and became the benchmark for extraterrestrial organic chemistry.

“It’s just further evidence that the chemical building blocks of life could have been delivered, and are still being delivered, to Earth today by these carbonaceous asteroid fragments,” said Glavin, who was a co-investigator for OSIRIS-REx, leading an international team that studied the organic composition of samples sent to Earth from the asteroid Bennu in 2023.

Understanding the Hillsborough meteorite required expertise from multiple scientific disciplines.

Astronomers reconstructed the meteorite’s journey through space and found evidence that it may have originated in the Erigone family of asteroids in the inner asteroid belt, home to asteroid Donaldjohanson, which was visited in 2025 by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft. Mineralogists identified evidence of ancient brines preserved within microscopic fractures, while organic chemists analyzed the meteorite’s inventory of amino acids and other organic compounds.

“Together, those complementary studies are helping scientists build one of the clearest pictures yet of how early asteroids like the asteroid Erigone evolved chemically over billions of years,” Jenniskens said.

Researchers continue to study the Hillsborough meteorite, revealing new details about how water transformed early asteroids and shaped the early solar system.

By tracing the history of water on early asteroids, scientists are learning how water and the chemical ingredients of life were distributed throughout the early solar system.

“If you follow water through the solar system, you are actually following life,” Zolensky said. “Following the history of water through the solar system is an essential part of understanding the origin of life.”

For more information about NASA’s astromaterials research and exploration, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/astromaterials

Karen Fox/Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

Victoria Segovia
NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111
victoria.segovia@nasa.gov