Meteorites are rocks from space that have entered our atmosphere. Most were once part of asteroids – the rocky, airless remnants left over from the formation of our solar system 4.6bn years ago. Almost all of them are what collectors call “finds”, meaning that the stone has been discovered by searching the ground, having fallen earlier – in most cases several thousand years earlier. A “fall”, a meteorite that is seen in flight and then recovered, is very, very rare. Worldwide, typically only about 10 such rocks are picked up each year. Before 2021, the last reported UK fall was a rock the size of a cricket ball that landed in a hedge in Glatton in Cambridgeshire in May 1991.