AD Stories: Mark Boslough’s Chelyabinsk Fragments
AD Stories: Mark Boslough’s Chelyabinsk Fragments https://asteroidday-uploads.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11035056/Mark-Boslough-%C2%A9-Chambre-de-Commerce_-Laurent-Antonelli-Agence-Blitz-e1547701811184.jpg 480 320 Asteroid Day https://asteroidday-uploads.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11035056/Mark-Boslough-%C2%A9-Chambre-de-Commerce_-Laurent-Antonelli-Agence-Blitz-e1547701811184.jpg
Our final Asteroid Day story comes from Mark Boslough, the chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel (ADXP) and expert on planetary impacts. Mark has maybe the most romantic story of all to tell!
Mark Boslough
Mark was on honeymoon the week before Asteroid Day. He proposed to his wife, who came along to Luxembourg as well, with a tiny piece of a stone that broke off the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia in 2013. He collected the stone on location in Russia when investigating the site of the air burst which happened on Valentine’s Day in 2013 – at least in the time zone Mark found himself in when it happened! And as if that wasn’t romantic enough yet, his and his wife’s wedding rings are made of the same Chelyabinsk stone, sparkling with metal flecks from the meteorite.
But he also has a couple of other pieces in his meteor shard collection: a piece that he brought to Starmus in 2012 which Stephen Hawking hold in his hand. And a piece of Libyan Desert glass, the crème brûlée of Sahara sand melted by the natural blowtorch of an ancient asteroid explosion in the sky.
(Image Credits: © Chambre de Commerce_ Laurent Antonelli : Agence Blitz)
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Read Rusty Schweickart’s story here.
Read Patrick Michel’s story here.
Read Alan Fitzsimmons’s story here.
Read Sabinije von Gaffke’s story here.
Read Mario Jurić’s story here.
