MANILA, Philippines — The National Museum of the Philippines are inviting Filipinos to celebrate Museum and Galleries Month this October by checking out its newly upgraded meteorite gallery.
The "Bulalato: Fragments from Space" exhibition now hosts six of the seven meteorites that have landed in the Philippines following three donations earlier this year for Philippine Space Week.
Mar Christian Cruz, Abraham Catiis, Melvin Lam, and Allen Yu of the Bayanihan Meteorite Recovery Team donated specimens to join the Orconuma, Bondoc, and Pantar meteorites.
The new additions include the first Philippine meteorite Pampanga, the fifth one Paitan, and the seventh and most recent Ponggo which was from Cruz's personal collection like Orconuma.
The 3.3 gram-Pampanga meteorite landed behind the Santa Monica Church in Mexico, Pampanga back in 1859.
Half a century later Paitan — whose main mass weighs 431.3 grams — landed in San Juan, Ilocos Sur in 1910 and was initially thought to be a part of Halley's Comet which flew by Earth that year.
Ponggo landed on a house in Quirino Province just last 2022, leaving a palm-sized crater on concrete floor.
The remaining meteorite is Calivo, which landed in Aklan back in 1916, as astronomers believe it was lost during World War II.
Also in the special exhibition, which just observed World Space Week, are four specimens donated by David Herskowitz, Ana Ophelia Herskowitz and Ferdinand Jolo Agbayani.
Among these is Northwest Africa 11273, a fragment of the Moon that landed on Earth. The others — Sahara 99753, Muonionalusta, and Brenham — are all meteorites.
The stony Sahara 99753 contains tiny spheres from primordial stardust called chondrules, the iron Muonionalusta was formed in a destroyed asteroid's core, and the very rare stony-iron Brenham glitters with olivine "space gems."
The National Museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. free of admission fees.