The iron in this meteorite ring has an interesting history. Thousands of years ago it skipped across the top of Earth's atmosphere, creating a field of fragments in China almost 500 km long. This month, we sent it back again.
 
On Aug. 3rd, the handcrafted ring flew to the stratosphere on board an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray research balloon. For 3 hours it floated above 99.4% of the atmosphere, where it once skipped in a glancing blow to our planet. This fragment comes from the Altai Mountains in China, and is known as an "Aletai meteorite."
 
Widmanstätten patterns on the ring confirm its celestial origin.