Winchcombe meteorite
meteorite that hit England in 2021
The Winchcombe meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite that was observed entering the Earth's atmosphere as a fluorescent green fireball over Gloucestershire, England, at 21:54 on 28 February 2021. Due to a public appeal, fragments were quickly recovered from the village of Winchcombe, enabling it to be collected for analysis before becoming degraded.
It is a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite originating from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
It was the first meteorite found in Britain since 1991.
Fragments of the meteorite were displayed at the London Natural History Museum on 17 May 2021.
Observation
Images of the meteoroid falling to Earth were captured by six camera networks of the UK Fireball Alliance, which is led by the Natural History Museum, as well as on the doorbell cameras of private dwellings. There were also over 1,000 eyewitness reports from the UK and elsewhere in Northern Europe, as well as a sonic boom heard in the local area. These observations allowed its trajectory to be reconstructed. A public appeal was issued for fragments.
Recovery
Subsequently, the Wilcock family found a pile of dark stones and powder on the driveway of their home in Winchcombe.
“Winchcombe meteorite” enters the record as meteorite that hit England in 2021. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Winchcombe, meteorite and England can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q105941450. Authority coordinates are 51.951, -1.976. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Winchcombe meteorite” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.