#NASA Crew-10 astronauts depart space station after five-month mission

#NASA’s Butch Wilmore retires from astronaut corps after spending 9 unexpected months in space.

Astronaut Butch Wilmore is retiring from NASA less than five months after he returned from a troubled test mission that left him aboard the International Space Station far longer than expected, the space agency announced Wednesday.

Wilmore, along with NASA astronaut Suni Williams, piloted the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft last year. The mission gained worldwide attention when the spacecraft experience several serious issues en route to the space station, including thruster outages and gas leaks.

Williams and Wilmore had been expected to stay about eight days in orbit. But NASA and Boeing spent weeks attempting to pinpoint what went wrong with their vehicle and assessing whether Starliner was safe to carry the astronauts home.

The space agency ultimately decided returning the duo to Earth aboard Starliner was too risky a proposition. NASA announced last August that Williams and Wilmore would join the next International Space Station crew rotation along with two other astronauts on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission and remain aboard the orbiting laboratory for several additional months.

Williams and Wilmore ultimately returned home in March — more than nine months after they left Earth. Such a duration of stay in orbit is not uncommon, as astronauts routinely live on the space station for six months or longer when they serve on staff rotation missions.
‘Legacy of fortitude’

Both astronauts have maintained the position that they were fully prepared for their extended stay in space, saying they each understood the risks and uncertainty associated with test flying a spacecraft for the first time.

Williams and Wilmore also repeatedly sought to quash narratives that they were “abandoned,” “stuck” or “stranded” in space.

“That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it, we both get it,” Wilmore told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in February. “Help us change the narrative, let’s change it to: prepared and committed despite what you’ve been hearing. That’s what we prefer.”

Wilmore’s “commitment to NASA’s mission and dedication to human space exploration is truly exemplary,” said Steve Koerner, the acting head of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where astronauts train, in a statement Wednesday.

“His lasting legacy of fortitude,” Koerner added, “will continue to impact and inspire the Johnson workforce, future explorers, and the nation for generations.”

Wilmore’s departure from NASA follows the example set by Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two astronauts who piloted the first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule in 2020. That mission marked the last for both Behken and Hurley, who have each since retired.

Wilmore, a Naval officer and test pilot who served in 21 combat missions, joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2000.

He flew on three missions during his 25 years of service, including a mission on the space shuttle Atlantis and a trip to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Notably, upon his return to Earth on a SpaceX capsule in March, Wilmore said that he would theoretically fly aboard one of Boeing’s Starliner capsules again if given the opportunity.

“We’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We’re going to fix them, we’re going to make it work,” Wilmore said during a March 31 news conference. “And with that, I’d get on in a heartbeat.”

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

#Tropical Storm Gil expected to become a hurricane in the eastern Pacific but won’t threaten land. The Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said the storm is about 920 miles (1,480 kilometres) west-southwest of the Baja California peninsula of Mexico.

Gil had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 km/h) and was moving west-northwest at 16 mph (26 km/h).

There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect. The storm is expected to keep traveling to the west-northwest in the coming days, as well as speed up as it crosses over the ocean.

Gil was strengthening during a busy period for storms in the eastern Pacific.

Tropical Storm Iona is moving west-northwest in the ocean, about 1,295 miles (2,080 kilometres) west-southwest of Honolulu with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 km/h). It was earlier a hurricane but has since weakened. It isn’t threatening land.

And other storms could develop in the coming days in the eastern Pacific, forecasters said.

U.S. Energy Department misrepresents climate science in new report, experts say.

The document released July 29 outlines the Trump administration’s rationale for revoking a foundational scientific ruling that underpins the government’s authority to combat climate change.

The paper was written by a working group including John Christy and Judith Curry, who have both in the past been linked to The Heartland Institute, an advocacy group that frequently pushes back against the scientific consensus on climate change.

It “completely misrepresents my work,” Benjamin Santer, atmospheric scientist and honorary professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Britain, told AFP.

Santer said a section of the report on “stratospheric cooling” contradicted his findings while citing his research on climate “fingerprinting,” a scientific method that seeks to separate human and natural climate change, as evidence for its analysis.

AFP and other media, including NOTUS, a US digital news website affiliated with the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute, found inaccurate citations, flawed analysis and editorial errors across the document.

This is the third time since January, when Donald Trump took office, that scientists have told AFP a government agency has misrepresented academic work to defend their policies.

Previous instances included made up citations in the government’s “Make America Healthy Again” report, which the administration then rushed to edit.

“I am concerned that a government agency has published a report, which is intended to inform the public and guide policy, without undergoing a rigorous peer‑review process, while misinterpreting many studies that have been peer‑reviewed,” Bor-Ting Jong, an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told AFP.

Jong said the paper made false statements about the climate model her team examined and used different terminology that led to a flawed analysis of her findings.

On Bluesky, the budding social media platform favoured by academics, other researchers in atmospheric and extreme weather fields also deplored that the DoE document cherry-picked data and omitted or plainly distorted their academic findings.

James Rae, a climate researcher at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who said his work is also misrepresented in the report, told AFP the shift in how the department uses scientific research “is really chilling.”

“DoE was at the forefront of science for decades. Whereas this report reads like an undergraduate exercise in misrepresenting climate science,” he said.

Contacted by AFP, a DoE spokesperson said the report was reviewed internally by a group of scientific researchers and policy experts from the Office of Science and National Labs.

The public will now have the opportunity to comment on the document before it is finalized for the Federal Register.

“The Climate Working Group and the Energy Department look forward to engaging with substantive comments following the conclusion of the 30-day comment period,” the department added.

First Australian-made rocket crashes after 14 seconds of flight in a failed attempt to reach orbit

The draft International Space Station (ISS) deorbiting program has already been developed and is expected to take about two and a half years, #Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Bakanov announced.

"A draft program for deorbiting the station has already been developed. According to experts, the process will take about two and a half years in total," he stated.

Bakanov arrived in Houston, Texas, for the first meeting in eight years between the heads of the Russian and American space agencies. "We plan to discuss continuing the cross-flight program and extending the operation of the International Space Station. We will also discuss the activities of the Russian-American working group on safely deorbiting the ISS and flooding it in a designated area of the ocean," he said.

On July 28, Bakanov reported that Roscosmos and NASA had reached a consensus that the ISS should operate until at least 2028, though it will likely remain in demand until 2030.

The ISS has been in orbit since November 20, 1998. The station weighs approximately 435 tons, and with docked spacecraft, it can reach 470 tons. Participants in this project include Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan, and the European Space Agency (#ESA), which comprises Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Earth is spinning faster, making days shorter — here’s why scientists say it could be a problem.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com. More exceptionally short days are coming on July 22 and August 5, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one full rotation on its axis —24 hours or 86,400 seconds on average. But in reality, each rotation is slightly irregular due to a variety of factors, such as the gravitational pull of the moon, seasonal changes in the atmosphere and the influence of Earth’s liquid core. As a result, a full rotation usually takes slightly less or slightly more than 86,400 seconds — a discrepancy of just milliseconds that doesn’t have any obvious effect on everyday life.

However these discrepancies can, in the long run, affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, which is why even the smallest time deviations are tracked using atomic clocks, which were introduced in 1955. Some experts believe this could lead to a scenario similar to the Y2K problem, which threatened to bring modern civilization to a halt.

Atomic clocks count the oscillations of atoms held in a vacuum chamber within the clock itself to calculate 24 hours to the utmost degree of precision. We call the resulting time UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on around 450 atomic clocks and is the global standard for timekeeping, as well as the time to which all our phones and computers are set.

Astronomers also keep track of Earth’s rotation — using satellites that check the position of the planet relative to fixed stars, for example — and can detect minute differences between the atomic clocks’ time and the amount of time it actually takes Earth to complete a full rotation. Last year, on July 5, 2024, Earth experienced the shortest day ever recorded since the advent of the atomic clock 65 years ago, at 1.66 milliseconds less than 24 hours.

“We’ve been on a trend toward slightly faster days since 1972,” said Duncan Agnew, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a research geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. “But there are fluctuations. It’s like watching the stock market, really. There are long-term trends, and then there are peaks and falls.”

In 1972, after decades of rotating relatively slowly, Earth’s spin had accumulated such a delay relative to atomic time that the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service mandated the addition of a “leap second” to the UTC. This is similar to the leap year, which adds an extra day to February every four years to account for the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun.

Since 1972, a total of 27 leap seconds have been added to the UTC, but the rate of addition has increasingly slowed, due to Earth speeding up; nine leap seconds were added throughout the 1970s while no new leap seconds have been added since 2016.

In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to retire the leap second by 2035, meaning we may never see another one added to the clocks. But if Earth keeps spinning faster for several more years, according to Agnew, eventually one second might need to be removed from the UTC. “There’s never been a negative leap second,” he said, “but the probability of having one between now and 2035 is about 40%.”
What is causing Earth to spin faster?

The shortest-term changes in Earth’s rotation, Agnew said, come from the moon and the tides, which make it spin slower when the satellite is over the equator and faster when it’s at higher or lower altitudes. This effect compounds with the fact that during the summer Earth naturally spins faster — the result of the atmosphere itself slowing down due to seasonal changes, such as the jet stream moving north or south; the laws of physics dictate that the overall angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant, so the rotation speed lost by the atmosphere is picked up by the planet itself. Similarly, for the past 50 years Earth’s liquid core has also been slowing down, with the solid Earth around it speeding up.

By looking at the combination of these effects, scientists can predict if an upcoming day could be particularly short. “These fluctuations have short-period correlations, which means that if Earth is speeding up on one day, it tends to be speeding up the next day, too,” said Judah Levine, a physicist and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the time and frequency division. “But that correlation disappears as you go to longer and longer intervals. And when you get to a year, the prediction becomes quite uncertain. In fact, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service doesn’t predict further in advance than a year.”

While one short day doesn’t make any difference, Levine said, the recent trend of shorter days is increasing the possibility of a negative leap second. “When the leap second system was defined in 1972, nobody ever really thought that the negative second would ever happen,” he noted. “It was just something that was put into the standard because you had to do it for completeness. Everybody assumed that only positive leap seconds would ever be needed, but now the shortening of the days makes (negative leap seconds) in danger of happening, so to speak.”

The prospect of a negative leap second raises concerns because there are still ongoing problems with positive leap seconds after 50 years, explained Levine. “There are still places that do it wrong or do it at the wrong time, or do it (with) the wrong number, and so on. And that’s with a positive leap second, which has been done over and over. There’s a much greater concern about the negative leap second, because it’s never been tested, never been tried.”

Because so many fundamental technologies systems rely on clocks and time to function, such as telecommunications, financial transactions, electric grids and GPS satellites just to name a few, the advent of the negative leap second is, according to Levine, somewhat akin to the Y2K problem — the moment at the turn of the last century when the world thought a kind of doomsday would ensue because computers might have been unable to negotiate the new date format, going from ’99’ to ’00.’
The role of melting ice

Climate change is also a contributing factor to the issue of the leap second, but in a surprising way. While global warming has had considerable negative impacts on Earth, when it comes to our timekeeping, it has served to counteract the forces that are speeding up Earth’s spin. A study published last year by Agnew in the journal Nature details how ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland is spreading over the oceans, slowing down Earth’s rotation — much like a skater spinning with their arms over their head, but spinning slower if the arms are tucked along the body.

“If that ice had not melted, if we had not had global warming, then we would already be having a leap negative leap second, or we would be very close to having it,” Agnew said. Meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has is responsible for a third of the global sea level rise since 1993, according to NASA.

The mass shift of this melting ice is not only causing changes in Earth’s rotation speed, but also in its rotation axis, according to research led by Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor at the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering of The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. If warming continues, its effect might become dominant. “By the end of this century, in a pessimistic scenario (in which humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases) the effect of climate change could surpass the effect of the moon, which has been really driving Earth’s rotation for the past few billions of years,” Soja said.

At the moment, potentially having more time to prepare for action is helpful, given the uncertainty of long-term predictions on Earth’s spinning behavior. “I think the (faster spinning) is still within reasonable boundaries, so it could be natural variability,” Soja said. “Maybe in a few years, we could see again a different situation, and long term, we could see the planet slowing down again. That would be my intuition, but you never know.”

By Jacopo Prisco.

Felix Baumgartner, the first skydiver to fall faster than the speed of sound, dies in crash in Italy.

Italian firefighters who responded said a paraglider crashed into the side of a swimming pool in the city of Porto Sant Elpidio.

The city’s mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, confirmed Baumgartner’s death in a social media post.

“Our community is deeply affected by the tragic disappearance of Felix Baumgartner, a figure of global prominence, a symbol of courage and passion for extreme flight,” the mayor said.

Baumgartner, known as “Fearless Felix,” stunned the world in 2012 when he became the first human to break the sound barrier with only his body. He wore a pressurized suit and jumped from a capsule hoisted more than 24 miles (39 kilometres) above Earth by a giant helium balloon over New Mexico.

The Austrian, who was part of the Red Bull Stratos team, topped out at 843.6 m.p.h. — the equivalent of 1.25 times the speed of sound — during a nine-minute descent. At one point, he went into a potentially dangerous flat spin while still supersonic, spinning for 13 seconds, his crew later said.

“When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about of breaking records anymore, you do not think of about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive,” he said after landing in the eastern New Mexico desert.

The altitude he jumped from also marked the highest-ever for a skydiver, shattering the previous record set in 1960 by Joe Kittinger, who served as an adviser to Baumgartner during his feat.

Baumgartner’s altitude record stood for two years until Google executive Alan Eustace set new marks for the highest free-fall jump and greatest free-fall distance​.

In 2012, millions watched YouTube’s livestream as Baumgartner coolly flashed a thumbs-up when he came out of the capsule high above Earth and then activated his parachute as he neared the ground, lifting his arms in victory after he landed.

Baumgartner, a former Austrian military parachutist, made thousands of jumps from planes, bridges, skyscrapers and famed landmarks around the world, including the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil.

In 2003, he flew across the English Channel in a carbon fiber wing after being dropped from a plane.

In recent years, he performed with The Flying Bulls as a helicopter stunt pilot in shows across Europe.

Baumgartner said after his record-breaking jump in 2012 that traveling faster than sound is “hard to describe because you don’t feel it.”

“Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,” he said.

Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

Colleen Barry And John Seewer, The Associated Press

#Researchers may have solved mystery of Mercury’s missing meteorites, but doubts remain.

Researchers suspect that two meteorites found in the Sahara Desert in 2023 may originally have come from Mercury, which would make them the first identified fragments of the solar system’s innermost planet.

The least studied and most mysterious of the solar system’s rocky planets, Mercury is so close to the sun that exploring it is difficult even for probes. Only two uncrewed spacecraft have visited it to date — Mariner 10, launched in 1973, and MESSENGER, launched in 2004. A third, BepiColombo, is en route and due to enter orbit around the planet in late 2026.

Scientists know little about Mercury’s geology and composition, and they have never been able to study a fragment of the planet that landed on Earth as a meteorite. In contrast, there are more than 1,100 known samples from the moon and Mars in the database of the #Meteoritical Society, an organization that catalogs all known meteorites.

These 1,100 meteorites originated as fragments flung from the surfaces of the moon and Mars during asteroid impacts before making their way to Earth after a journey through space.

Not every planet is likely to eject fragments of itself Earth-ward during collisions. Though Venus is closer to us than Mars is, its greater gravitational pull and thick atmosphere may prevent the launch of impact debris. But some astronomers believe that Mercury should be capable of generating meteors.

“Based on the amount of lunar and Martian meteorites, we should have around 10 Mercury meteorites, according to dynamical modeling,” said Ben Rider-Stokes, a postdoctoral researcher in achondrite meteorites at the U.K.’s Open University and lead author of a study on the Sahara meteorites, published in June in the journal Icarus.

“However, Mercury is a lot closer to the sun, so anything that’s ejected off Mercury also has to escape the sun’s gravity to get to us. It is dynamically possible, just a lot harder. No one has confidently identified a meteorite from Mercury as of yet,” he said, adding that no mission thus far has been capable of bringing back physical samples from the planet either.

If the two meteorites found in 2023 — named Northwest Africa 15915 (NWA 15915) and Ksar Ghilane 022 (KG 022) — were confirmed to be from Mercury, they would greatly advance scientists’ understanding of the planet, according to Rider-Stokes. But he and his coauthors are the first to warn of some inconsistencies in matching those space rocks to what scientists know about Mercury.

The biggest is that the fragments appear to have formed about 500 million years earlier than the surface of Mercury itself. However, according to Rider-Stokes, this finding could be based on inaccurate estimates, making a conclusive assessment unlikely. “Until we return material from Mercury or visit the surface,” he said, “it will be very difficult to confidently prove, and disprove, a Mercurian origin for these samples.”

But there are some compositional clues that suggest the meteorites might have a link to the planet closest to the sun.
Hints of Mercurian origins

It’s not the first time that known meteorites have been associated with Mercury. The previous best candidate, based on the level of interest it piqued in astronomers, was a fragment called Northwest Africa (NWA) 7325, which was reportedly found in southern Morocco in early 2012.

Rider-Stokes said that was the first meteorite to be potentially associated with Mercury: “It got a lot of attention. A lot of people got very excited about it.” Further analysis, however, showed a richness in chrome at odds with Mercury’s predicted surface composition.

More recently, astronomers have suggested that a class of meteorites called aubrites — from a small meteorite that landed in 1836 in Aubres, France — might come from Mercury’s mantle, the layer below the surface. However, these meteorites lack a chemical compatibility with what astronomers know about the planet’s surface, Rider-Stokes said. “That’s what’s so exciting about the samples that we studied — they have sort of the perfect chemistry to be representative of Mercury,” he said.

Most of what is known about Mercury’s surface and composition comes from NASA’s MESSENGER probe, which assessed the makeup of the planet’s crust from orbit. Both meteorites from the study, which Rider-Stokes analyzed with several instruments including an electron microscope, contain olivine and pyroxene, two iron-poor minerals confirmed by MESSENGER to be present on Mercury.

The new analysis also revealed a complete lack of iron in the space rock samples, which is consistent with scientists’ assumptions about the planet’s surface. However, the meteorites contained only trace amounts of plagioclase, a mineral believed to dominate Mercury’s surface.

The biggest point of uncertainty, though, is still the meteorites’ age. “They are about 4.5 billion years old,” Rider-Stokes said, “and most of Mercury’s surface is only about 4 billion years old, so there’s a 500 million-year difference.”

However, he said he thinks this discrepancy is not sufficient to rule out a Mercurian origin, due to the limited reliability of MESSENGER’s data, which has been also used to estimate the age of Mercury’s surface layer.

“These estimates are based on impact cratering models and not absolute age dating, and therefore may not be entirely accurate,” Rider-Stokes said. “It doesn’t mean that these samples aren’t good analogs for regional areas on the surface of Mercury, or the early Mercurian crust that is not visible on the modern surface of Mercury.”

With more modern instruments now available, BepiColombo, the European Space Agency probe that will start studying Mercury in early 2027, may be able to answer long-standing questions about the planet, such as where it formed and whether it has any water.

Having material confirmed to have come from other planetary bodies helps astronomers understand the nature of early solar system’s building blocks, Rider-Stokes said, and identifying fragments of Mercury would be especially crucial since a mission to gather samples from the planet closest to the sun and bring them back would be extremely challenging and expensive.
Clues to planet formation

Sean Solomon, principal investigator for NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury, said in an email that he believes the two meteorites described in the recent paper likely did not originate from Mercury. Solomon, an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University in New York City, was not involved with the study.

The primary reason Solomon cited for his doubts is that the meteorites formed much earlier than the best estimates for the ages of rocks now on Mercury’s surface. But he said he thinks the samples still hold research value.

“Nonetheless, the two meteorites share many geochemical characteristics with Mercury surface materials, including little to no iron … and the presence of sulfur-rich minerals,” he added. “These chemical traits have been interpreted to indicate that Mercury formed from precursor materials much more chemically reduced than those that formed Earth and the other inner planets. It may be that remnants of Mercury precursor materials still remain among meteorite parent bodies somewhere in the inner solar system, so the possibility that these two meteorites sample such materials warrants additional study.”

Solomon also noted that it was difficult to persuade the planetary science community that there were samples from Mars in meteorite collections, and that it took precise matching of their chemistry with data about the surface of Mars taken by the Viking probes to convince researchers to take a closer look. Lunar meteorites were also not broadly acknowledged to be in meteorite collections until after the existence of Martian meteorites had been demonstrated in the 1980s, he added, even though the Apollo and Luna missions had returned abundant samples of lunar materials more than a decade earlier.

Once samples are confirmed to be from a planetary body, Solomon said, they can provide crucial information not available from remote sensing by an orbiting spacecraft on the timing of key geological processes, the history of internal melting of the body, and clues to planet formation and early solar system processes.

Rider-Stokes plans to continue the discussion around these meteorites at the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, which takes place in Perth this week. “I’m going to discuss my findings with other academics across the world,” he said. “At the moment, we can’t definitively prove that these aren’t from Mercury, so until that can be done, I think these samples will remain a major topic of debate across the planetary science community.”

The biggest piece of Mars on Earth is going up for auction in New York.

Sotheby’s in New York will be auctioning what’s known as NWA 16788 on Wednesday as part of a natural history-themed sale that also includes a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton that’s more than six feet (two metres) tall and nearly 11 feet (three metres) long.

According to the auction house, the meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike before traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometres) to Earth, where it crashed into the Sahara. A meteorite hunter found it in Niger in November 2023, Sotheby’s says.

The red, brown and gray hunk is about 70 per cent larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly seven per cent of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby’s says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by six inches (375 millimetres by 279 millimetres by 152 millimetres).

“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”

It is also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, Sotheby’s says.

Hatton said a small piece of the red planet remnant was removed and sent to a specialized lab that confirmed it is from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.

The examination found that it is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a course-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.

It also has a glassy surface, likely due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.

The meteorite previously was on exhibit at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby’s did not disclose the owner.

It’s not clear exactly when the meteorite hit Earth, but testing shows it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s said.

The juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton was found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it’s ready to exhibit, Sotheby’s says.

The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, Sotheby’s says. It’s auction estimate is $4 million to $6 million.

Ceratosaurus dinosaurs were bipeds with short arms that appear similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but smaller. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25 feet (7.6 metres) long, while the Tyrannosaurs rex could be 40 feet (12 metres) long.

The skeleton was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.

Wednesday’s auction is part of Sotheby’s Geek Week 2025 and features 122 items, including other meteorites, fossils and gem-quality minerals.

Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut.

Dave Collins And Joseph B. Frederick, The Associated Press