A year ago, a two-tonne rock burst into Earth’s atmosphere from space, and a fragment was found by nine-year-old Eli-zé du Toit in the Eastern Cape.
Twelve months later, scientists have tracked the Nqweba Meteorite back to its origin in the Main Asteroid Belt between Jupiter and Mars. At a public lecture hosted by Nelson Mandela University on 23 September, Professor Roger Gibson from Wits University’s School of Geosciences shared insights about this remarkable finding and highlighted the crucial role of citizen science observers.
“The excitement and sense of wonder people felt when they saw ‘fire in the sky’ and quickly reported it was critical to scientists researching this event,” said Gibson about the event on 25 August last year, when the meteorite appeared as a brilliant fireball across the Eastern Cape.
Eli-zé found the first fragment in the Nqweba (Kirkwood) district when she saw a small dark rock fall from a tree in her grandparents’ garden. It was presented to Dr Carla Dodd from Nelson Mandela University’s Department of Geosciences, who quickly contacted colleagues from Rhodes and Wits universities.
“Our response time was critical to pinpoint sightings and find more fragments in a vast area,” Gibson explained. “Within 24 hours, it was world news, bringing pressure as meteorite hunters arrived from everywhere. There’s huge money in private meteorite collections.”
The multi-university teams scoured the area between Nqweba and Cape St Francis, sleeping only four hours a night. By day twelve, four fragments had been added to Eli-zé’s sample, and by day 18, five more were found.
“We found a total mass of half a kilogram from what was initially a two-tonne rock travelling at 20km per second. We consider ourselves extremely lucky to have found what we have,” Gibson said.
The Eastern Cape Provincial Heritage Resources Authority issued permits within two days, allowing immediate organisation – a stark contrast to Botswana’s 2018 meteorite find, where delays allowed unpermitted hunters to reach the area first.
Gibson emphasised that the Nqweba find “offers the opportunity to look across vast distances of space to another world and back in time to conditions that formed our own world. “What makes this discovery special is its collaborative nature, built around citizen scientists and multiple institutions across countries.
The ongoing research includes teams from the Astronomical Society of South Africa (ASSA), NASA’s SETI Institute, and international research laboratories.
NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies recorded the event as it happened. Over 150 written witness reports were compiled from citizen observers, some from as far as Ceres and Bloemfontein, over 550km away.
Mobile phone, dashcam, and security videos were tracked down across the Eastern Cape.Video analysis allowed ASSA’s Tim Cooper to identify at least 18 break-up events in the fireball, visible for over 250 kilometres along the coastal region between Mossel Bay and Nqweba.
People felt ground vibrations from the shock wave, and witnesses described hearing thunder and screeching sounds as rock fragments whistled past.
Scientists now know the Nqweba meteorite is a rare achondritic Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED) breccia — a rock made of broken fragments. HED meteorites originate from Vesta, the second-largest body in the Main Asteroid Belt.
“We know a lot about Vesta because NASA’s Dawn space probe studied it in 2011-2012,” Gibson explained. “That mission confirmed it’s a protoplanet that formed a metal core. Its size (525 km across) allowed it to conserve heat long enough to completely melt, with metal sinking inward to form a nickel-iron core and silicate melts crystallising around it.”
These processes created magmatic rocks largely indistinguishable from Earth rocks, apart from their exceptional age and chemical signatures. HED meteorites show Vesta was solid by 4.56 billion years ago, only 40 million years after solar system formation.
The ten main fragments display beautiful black glassy fusion crusts with bubbles, wrinkles and flow lines, showing how airflow dragged melted material backwards during their fiery descent. Broken surfaces reveal concrete-like mixtures of green crystals and rock fragments in a grey matrix.
For analysis, the team used CT scanners to build 3D images, optical and electron microscopes for mineralogical information, and electron microprobes for chemical data. These steps were necessary for submission to the International Meteoritical Society’s Nomenclature Committee.
The Committee approved the application in September 2025, allowing the team to submit results for publication. Scientists are now pie-cing together mineralogical, textural, and geochemical evidence to build the fragments’ “life story” and, by extension, Vesta’s history.
“Future isotopic analysis will help us understand how this particular rock mixture formed and what happened between when it was blasted off Vesta and its arrival on Earth,” Gibson said.
Professor Lew Ashwal, who studied the first Apollo lunar samples, remains as excited as the search team members. While pursuing scientific analysis, they continue searching for more pieces to expand knowledge about our solar system and share discoveries with the public.
