The British and Irish Meteorite Society

Brother Guy Consolmagno is the curator of the Vatican Observatory's meteorite collection, and also analyses the space rocks under his care. He explains how the Vatican came to own a meteorite collection, and how he has been using non-destructive techniques to test them and discover properties such as density, conductivity and magnetic field structure. He tells us about the conundrum of how dense rocks emerge from fields of apparently 'fluffy' asteroids, and what this can tell us about the ancient history of our Solar System. He also describes the problem of the weathering of meteorites once they land on Earth.