Helen FieldsScience Writer

The other day I went to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum to look at some meteorites. It was really cool. I held a piece of Mars in my hand. Actually, two pieces. Of MARS. The PLANET. Which is in OUTER SPACE. These rocks weren’t brought back by a spacecraft – they’re pieces of Mars that got knocked off in some kind of impact, flew through space, hit our atmosphere, and made it to the ground without burning up. Whew.

These, however, are not meteorites:

The boxes and envelopes on the corner of that desk are rocks that people have sent in for the museum’s meteorite specialists to check out. (The big white bag on the right is leftover Halloween candy.) Here’s a tip: If you find a funky-looking rock in your backyard, there’s a really, really, really good chance that it’s just a rock. From Earth.

I even got to see a little piece of this meteorite – the one that made the big “Omg Life on Mars!” splash in 1996. It was in its own traveling case.

Gratuitous beautiful meteorite picture:

This is a slice of a pallasite. It’s like a naturally occurring piece of stained glass – gemstones in a matrix of iron and nickel. I totally want one. But they’re rare and expensive, and I’m pretty sure the museum’s crack meteorite team would’ve noticed if I’d taken this one with me.

This is a slice of a big hunk of nickel and iron that broke off from the core of some asteroid. It was collected in Antarctica. Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, but they’re particularly easy to find on the Antarctic ice sheet, because there aren’t a lot of other black things. Also, the way the ice moves seems to concentrate them in a few places.