In 1920, a farmer in Namibia was plowing a field when his blade screeched to a stop. He had hit the top of a giant slab of metal buried just under the dirt. When workers dug it up, they discovered the biggest meteorite ever found: a 60-ton lump of iron and nickel from space, called the Hoba meteorite.
It is about 9 feet on each side and almost 3 feet thick, like a kitchen table made of solid iron. It probably crashed to Earth about 80,000 years ago, but strangely there is no big crater around it. Scientists think its flat shape made it skim through the air like a stone bouncing on a pond.
Because it weighs as much as ten elephants, no one has ever moved it. Instead, the field around it has been turned into a small park. You can walk right up, lay your hand on a piece of an asteroid, and feel the cool metal that traveled across the solar system to get there.
