Motopi Pan / asteroid 2018 LA

A new meteorite with associated orbit has been added to the table: Motopi Pan. Although officially classified as a howardite (in the MetBull database), it is a complex HED breccia with howardite, cumulate and basaltic eucrites, as well as diogenite lithologies, as the authors write in an article published online today in MAPS (Jenniskens et al., 2021). This is only the second time (the first was Almahata Sitta in 2008) that a meter-scale asteroid was found to be on a collision course with Earth only a few hours prior to impact (the asteroid was named 2018 LA), observed as a meteor when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, and meteorites recovered afterwards, this time in Botswana. Because of the longer observation arc, the orbit is much better constrained compared to a typical “meteorite-with-orbit” fall. The orbit strongly suggests the meteoroid was delivered via the nu-6 resonance from the large asteroid Vesta. From the combination of ejection age (= cosmic-ray exposure age, ca. 22 Ma) and shock-reset age in phosphates, Jennsikens et al. (2021) even suggest that the source crater of the impact might be Rubria, in the Venenaia impact basin on Vesta.

Full disclosure: I am a co-author on the paper. /m4