Jim Brook with frozen remains Canada's great meteor find.
Jim Brook with frozen remains Canada’s great meteor find.
Smoketrail from Tagish Lake meteorite. photo by EwaldLemke
Smoketrail from Tagish Lake meteorite. Photo by EwaldLemke

2001 American Institute of Physics, Bulletin of Physics News, Number 521. Physicists in two separate laboratories stop a pulse of light.

canada2000 – A meteor thundered over the Yukon in Canada. The noise and smell sent residents running. It’s remains land on
Tagish Lake and are smartly collected by Jim Brook and turned over to Canadian and NASA scientists for analysis. It is a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of space rock that contains many forms of carbon and organics, basic building blocks of life. The find is potentially the most important recovery of a rock  from space in at least 31 years. Later analysis of 45 chemical elements suggests that the space rock contains material that is unchanged since the birth of the solar system.

2000 – NASA ends attempts to contact Mars Polar Lander. It was lost on Dec. 3, 1999 during the landing phase of the mission.

Mars Lander, Missing in Action
Mars Lander, Missing in Action

2000 – The glow of x rays seen in all directions in space was now resolved into emissions from discrete sources by the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, ending the notion that the x rays come from distant hot gas. The American Institute of Physics Bulletin.

Birthdays

1971 – Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum.