NASA first abandoned research at Campo del Cielo in 1969 after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. “They should keep studying Campo del Cielo,” he says. Cassidy lately has moved on to study impacts in Antarctica but he barely scratched the surface at the site in Argentina. This diversity allows meteoriticists to perform calculations to help them determine details about the impactor and its orbit, which can serve as models to improve the understanding of meteorite impacts elsewhere on Earth. Campo del Cielo, however, underwent impacts from objects of various masses coming in at roughly the same angle and speed as the original impactor broke up. So scientists often are unable to determine a meteorite’s total mass, its angle of impact and other characteristic details. For the majority of impacts on Earth, it’s impossible to recover the entire intact mass of the meteorite, says Bill Cassidy, a researcher who studied the site for NASA in the 1960s and 2000s. 'They could have been unearthed, because they seem to not have been cut,” prosecutor Hugo Baigorri told local media, “but all this will be determined by the criminal experts.”Ĭampo de Cielo’s bounty of meteorites is deemed by scientists to be unique. The four men were arrested and the origin of their cosmic haul is being investigated. The security forces found some hundreds of heavy and orange-colored stones inside the vehicle. Only last May Argentina's National Gendarmerie recovered 1,500 kilograms of meteorites that were being transported in a truck by four men. There have been numerous reports of authorities apprehending meteorite smugglers in the area. Another concern is that the province of Santiago del Estero, into which Campo del Cielo extends, lacks similar regulations, leaving some of the material unprotected. In addition, the rules are unclear about the adjacent craters, which could hold more scientific value than the meteorites. Another bill declares the meteorites are part of the province's cultural heritage.Īstronomers state, however, that the controls are inadequate some meteorite traffickers and locals ignore the site’s cultural value and remove the objects. This legislation also prohibits the export of said material out of the province and sets penalties and fines for violations. Now local researchers are raising concerns about weak protection for the region’s space rock heritage.Ĭhaco Province passed a law in 1990 to declare meteorites as being of cultural interest and part of public domain.

NASA scientists have investigated the site on two occasions.

Its size is second only to Hoba, a 66-ton rock that fell in Namibia no earlier than 80,000 years ago. The result was a shower of meteorites ranging in size from small stones weighting only a few grams to El Chaco, a behemoth weighing in at 37 tons and the second-largest intact meteorite in the world. The region is referred to as Campo del Cielo (Field of Heaven or Field of the Sky), unique in the world for its trove of well-preserved objects from space.Ĭampo del Cielo features 1,350 square kilometers of meteorite impacts formed 4,000 years ago when a huge metallic fireball struck Earth at almost a right angle, as if trying to make a graceful landing, at a speed of 14,000 kilometers per hour. The flat terrain, however, is not a typical agrarian landscape but rather is studded with enormous metallic meteorites and craters created by pieces of the same source rock.

Argentina’s Chaco Province, a vast plain once covered by dense forest, is today home to farmland.

Campo del cielo meteorite