Researchers now know the origin of a celebrated meteorite that fell onto the roof of a house in Novato, California in 2012.

On the evening of October 17, 2013, a bright fireball seen near San Francisco was later identified as the first Novato meteorite. This meteorite, an L6 type chondrite fragmental breccia, was found by Novato resident Lisa Webber after Peter Jenniskens' publication of the trajectory of the fireball from video recorded by stations of his Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance project.

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Jenniskens, a renowned meteor astronomer, said his team of 50 reserchers believes the meteorite's long history dates back to when the Earth's moon was formed after a massive impact with another planet, according to Phys.org.

The first meteorite was found by Novato residents Glenn Rivera and Lisa Webber after they remembered hearing something had hit their garage roof. They then made the space rock available for study.

The meteorite wasofficially named "Novato" as researchers often give a meteorite's name to the location where the meteorite was found, according to The Meteoritical Society, a non-profit scholarly organization founded in 1933 to promote research and education in planetary science with emphasis on studies of meteorites.

"We determined that the meteorite likely got its black appearance from massive impact shocks causing a collisional resetting event 4.472 billion years ago, roughly 64-126 million years after the formation of the solar system," said Qing-Zhu Yin, professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

"We now suspect that the moon-forming impact may have scattered debris all over the inner solar system and hit the parent body of the Novato meteorite."

Yin and his colleagues surmised that some 470 million years ago, the meteorite's parent body broke into pieces after another big collision. The event's legacy is a debris field in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars from which "L6 ordinary chondrites," or Novato-like meteorites, are currently approaching the Earth.

TagsMeteorite, Novato, california, NASA, SETI, Mars, Jupiter, Asteroid Belt