NASA Astronomers and amateur asteroid hunters alike believe they have tracked down fragments of the fireball that exploded somewhere over the Sierra Nevadas early Sunday morning. By analyzing a weather radar loop, Dr. Petrus Jenniskens of the NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, traced the a handful of space debris to an asphalt parking lot in the tiny town of Lotus, California in El Dorado County.

Robert Ward, an amateur meteor hunter and collector from Arizona, was apparently the first to come across the fragments of rare material known as "CM" — carbonaceous chondrite — believed to be millions of years old. Ward, who drove straight from Arizona, found two pieces of the material near a baseball field on the edge of Lotus, CA, just a stone's throw from where gold was first discovered in California in 1848.

Jenniskens, meanwhile, is the same guy who once trekked across the Nubian desert to bring home pieces of a small asteroid that fell to Earth a couple years back, so we assume he knows how to tell meteor fragments apart from your average parking lot gravel. Which is good, because he told the Chronicle that the fragments he found in Lotus had apparently been run over by a car. Still, the fragments managed to make it to earth without burning up the organic material inside. The "good stuff", as Jenniskens called those materials, are amino acids and sugars apparently not found on Earth.

While the prospect of studying something that may have helped create life on Earth has NASA all excited, we can't help but think that this is actually the plot of The Andromeda Strain. And that organic material ended up killing an entire (fictional) small town in Nevada. (Why aren't we hiding these meteor bits in a five-story underground bunker, is what we're trying to get at here.) If that doesn't scare the bejeezus out of Michael Crichton fans, one nuclear chemist from UCLA reckons there are probably hundreds of meteor mavens and space rock dealers out there hunting for more fragments already

Anyhow, Petrus, who is our new favorite NASA scientist, is also asking for anyone who may have grabbed amateur videos or photos of Sunday's explosion to send them in so the space agency can better understand the meteor's trajectory. Those materials, even crappy surveillance footage can be sent to [email protected]

Finally, for a closer look at the space shrapnel, here's KTVU's video report from NASA Ames.

Previously: Just How Big Was That Lake Tahoe Meteor?, Meteor Reportedly Crashes To Earth Near Lake Tahoe, Fails To Obliterate All Of Humanity

[KTVU]

[Chron]