Friday, April 25, 2025
I asked Douglas Netherland at the Meteor Crater Museum, west of Odessa, to explain the difference between a meteor and a meteorite.
“A meteor is still in the sky and a meteorite has landed,” he quickly answered.
A meteor streaked across the sky and landed near Odessa 63 thousand years ago and formed a crater.
“It wasn’t discovered until the late 40s. It’s essentially just a space rock. It’s just a body formed in space.”
Douglas is curator of the state-of-the-art museum at the crater.
“From what I understand, it’s anywhere from Saturn to the asteroid belt is where this meteorite came from. It came from west to east when it fell. We don’t know how fast it was coming in or how steep the angle was when it landed. There are five distinct craters, because it exploded in the atmosphere and broke again when it hit the ground.”
At the time the meteor fell, the Odessa area was submerged under 600 feet of water that acted as a buffer before the meteor hit the ground.
“So, our crater is not as deep as what it would have been due to the fact that a bunch of water rushed back in and brought all the sediment in to fill the crater quite rapidly. It’s believed that it was initially about 115 feet deep.”
Two of the five craters are on the museum complex. The other three are on private property. The museum has a large crater that’s 450 feet wide and approximately 6 to 8 feet deep. The small crater is 20 feet wide and around 8 feet deep. The visitor center has samples of meteorites from all over the world, including some from the Odessa crater. The largest piece is the size of a football.
“It’s iron, nickel, copper, cobalt, and a few other trace materials, so it’s a bunch of heavy metals.”
The museum gets about 3,000 visitors a year.
“We have guests from all over the world that come and visit. Apparently, we have been in a few movies from overseas, because we have people that want to come see this place and the Rio Grande from watching westerns and things of that nature. This is a national natural landmark that belongs to the department of the interior and is maintained by Ector County.
For years, a marker on the highway was about the only indication that something significant was just off the interstate. Tom Rodman of Odessa was responsible for getting an historical marker and the grant that built the museum building that was completed in 2002.
