Curious. Have scientists ever drilled into one of these sights to get to the meteor?
Explorers drilled in Meteor crater in Arizona for years, looking for a massive iron/nickle deposit. They never found any large mass. Just small bits and pieces. Biggest was a couple of yards across.
Yes, Shoemaker, of the Shoemaker-Levy comet that plowed into Jupiter in the 1990s, drilled into Arizonas Meteor Crater and found tons of meteor debris. Here? Don’t know.
Barringer (Meteor Crater is sometimes called Barringer Crater) was the geologist who tried to recover the suspected nickel-iron mass of the meteorite. Found bupkis.
As marktwain pointed out, the impact energy shatters and melts the the impactor along with the ejecta from the crater. This makes for tiny remnant grains flying off in all directions, along with the shocked quartz and other minerals formed or transformed by the heat.
The geologist Eugene Shoemaker was an official witness to one of the a-bomb tests and examined the area around the blast site, discovering these types of materials which had been formed by the blast. That got him thinking about Meteor Crater (which was still not considered an impact crater by most geologists and probably zero volcanologists), so he returned to it and found those very same types of materials.
His paper on the impact origin of Meteor Crater arrived with a resounding thud.
He and Carolyn took a vacay or maybe their honeymoon in the Ries Basin in Germany, with him in search of impact evidence. The local cathedral turned out to be made of locally quarried stone that was absolutely lousy with coesite. That paper generated some curiousity, perhaps because the impact was circa 15 million years ago.
It's okay, y'see, to have the occasional catastrophe, provided it doesn't make the hospital-corners set uncomfortable. Most scientists and their precursors (along with all the flat-earth nimrods) have rejected impacts from space since Aristotle, who stated flatly that stones don't fall from the sky.
Shoemaker's first big success was vicariously, when one of his old students went on Apollo 17 and examined the surface, finding that impact (including continuous micrometeorites for billions of years) is far and away the dominant force at work forming the lunar surface. He'd have been the one doing that, but his adrenal cortex went haywire and knocked him out of the running for Apollo.
However, it wasn't until the fragments of comet SL-9 started pullin' train on planet Jupiter that impact geology, his own creation, became the dominant paradigm.