Chasing Meteorites
Marc Fries and Linda Welzenbach-Fries had never seen a highway so beautiful.
The grass was freshly mowed. The road was flat. Light-colored gravel lined either side of U.S. 84 near Natchez, Miss. It was the perfect place to find freshly fallen space rocks.
The husband and wife team had come to this spot after a drive of more than five hours from Clear Lake and a decade of using weather radar and computer models to predict where meteorites —bits of space rocks that survive the trip through the Earth’s atmosphere — would land. Marc Fries had made similar treks before, heading to spots where the computer model led him, only to be disappointed.
On this hot day in late April, as they walked along the highway scanning the close-clipped grass and swatting away gnats, they hoped this time would be different.
