Combining the observations of the small asteroid in space with information gleaned from the meteorites shows it likely came from Vesta, second largest asteroid in our Solar System and target of NASA's DAWN mission, billions of years ago, two giant impacts on Vesta created a family of larger, more dangerous asteroids. The newly recovered meteorites gave us a clue on when those impacts might have happened.

Peter Jenniskens

Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens (born 2 August 1962, in Horst) is a Dutch and American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers. Jenniskens is the author of the 790 page book "Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets" published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Jenniskens is president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union (2012-2015) and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature (2006–2012) after it was first established. Discovered at Ond?ejov Observatory by Petr Pravec, asteroid "42981 Jenniskens" is named in his honor. In 2008, Jenniskens together with Muawia Shaddad, led a team from the University of Khartoum in Sudan that recovered fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert, marking the first time meteorite fragments had been found from an object that was previously tracked in outer space before hitting Earth.

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