I had a plan. I even publicly announced it (though that was never my intention). I had been saving old hard drives with the intention of extracting the super powerful magnets from them. I was looking into rain barrels. The place we just moved into has a large roof that funnels all the water down into one drain.

It would have been a simple matter to use the magnets to collect all the little bits of magnetic stuff that falls on the house over time, from the sky. And, since most of these bits of magnetic stuff are iron meteorites, I’d be able to collect a zillion meteorites every year! Bwa ha ha ha!!!

But then I read In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micrometeorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters by micrometeorite expert Jon Larsen.

It turns out that while micrometeorites do in fact fall on us at a regular rate, and some of them are attracted to magnets, the vast majority Continue reading How To Collect And Identify Micrometeorites →