Mike Zolensky is Featured in an Article in The Atlantic!

So cool!:

When Mike Zolensky saw the night sky over the Australian desert glow red in June of 2010, he knew: The long-awaited object had plunged through the atmosphere and fallen to Earth.

Zolensky, a curator of astromaterials, and dozens of others leapt into action. The team dispatched a helicopter to find the fallen object in the darkness. At daybreak, elders from the local indigenous population arrived to check whether it had landed on any sacred sites. The next visitors wore helmets and protective gear, should the object explode, and carried spermicidal spray, in case it had cracked, releasing something alive. On top of everything else, they all had to watch out for kangaroos. “They’re all over the place,” Zolensky told me.

Later that day, the crew retrieved what had tumbled from the sky: tiny dust grains from a rocky asteroid tucked inside a little spaceship built by humans specifically to protect them. 

These are the lengths that researchers have gone to in order to obtain a piece of the wonders beyond Earth, even microscopic particles about as small as a single human blood cell. And though these so-called sample-return missions are risky, with no guarantee of success, they’re booming. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, which retrieved those asteroid grains in 2010, made a second catch in Australia in 2018, from a different asteroid. China brought home moon samples last year. A NASA spacecraft will deliver more asteroid pieces in 2023, and a JAXA mission to Phobos, Mars’s largest moon, is already in development.