On 22 March 1998, as seven boys played basketball near Monahans, Texas, a meteorite struck Ward County carrying 4.6-billion-year-old water trapped in purple salt crystals. This was the first extraterrestrial water ever captured on Earth: microscopic drops that had journeyed from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to land in West Texas. One of the cosmic water meteorites was sent to NASA's Johnson Space Center for analysis.

Two stones, weighing 1344 g and 1243 g, fell in the city of Monahans, Texas, after two sonic booms and a fireball were observed over a wide area (up to 100 km from the fall site). One stone penetrated the asphalt on a city street and was found in the sandy subsurface.

I took these photographs around the Monahans dunes, one of the most beautiful places I have stood. It looks like desert, but the sandhills are a semi-arid ecosystem where groundwater seeps up between 70-foot dunes, creating an entirely different world. Small oaks sink roots 90 feet deep to tap underground water, which stabilizes the dunes while badgers, kangaroo rats, and javelinas emerge at dusk to drink from the seeps. The forces that preserve water here are wind-carved sand acting as both barrier and vessel.

The Jupiter connection comes from the water itself, not the meteorite's origin. This meteorite carried "direct evidence of complex prebiotic chemistry from a water-rich world in the outer solar system" meaning the water and organic materials within it likely formed in the cold outer reaches beyond Jupiter's orbit during the early solar system, before being incorporated into asteroids that later migrated inward. It's the water that's from the Jupiter region, not the rock that carried it to Earth.

When such a rock strikes Texas sand, we receive a time capsule: water that predates Earth's oceans, preserved since the solar system's infancy and delivered to us. Space and time crystals.