Tag: Meteorites

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Reports of a possible meteorite impact in Mexico are popping up on various places around the net. Via Twitter, this translated article said a bright light “accompanied by a roar which swayed buildings and houses” was reported in towns in the bordering states of Puebla and Hidalgo, at about 18:30 local time on Wednesday, Feb. 10, and is being attributed to a meteorite. The article includes reports of a bridge collapsing and a 30-meter crater causing “tension among people.”

We’ll confirm if this is an actual meteorite hit as soon as more details become available. The Bad Astronomer has also posted about this, so check his site for updates, too.
Here’s a map of the region where the reports are originating.

A meteorite came through the roof of a doctor’s office in Lorton, Virginia, USA. No one was hurt, but a hole was punched through the roof and ceiling. “It came through the roof, through the fire wall through the ceiling and hit the floor,” said Dr. Frank Ciampi in this video from WUSA TV.

When he heard the noise, he thought a set of bookshelves had fallen down. The rock broke into pieces, but put together are about the size of a tennis ball. A planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, Cari Corrigan, confirmed the rock is a meteorite. She says the meteorite weighs just over a half pound (.22 kg) and was probably traveling about 350 kph (220 mph) when it struck the building.

Researchers say the meteorite is a chondrite, the most common type of space rocks that fall to Earth.

Lorton is just outside of the Washington, DC area, and has a population of about 28,000 people.

Source: WUSA News

Three golf ball-sized fragments have been found from a meteorite that created a brilliant fireball seen over Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2009. The first meteorite fragment recovered did some damage to the windshield of a Nissan Pathfinder, and now two other fragments have been found on nearby properties. The meteor made headlines initially because it was captured on video by Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) on seven of its ‘all-sky’ cameras. The brightness was estimated to be approximately 100 times brighter than a full moon.

Initially, the owners of the SUV didn’t realize the “unusual” rock they found on the hood of the vehicle was a meteorite and chalked up the shattered windshield to vandalism and filed a police report.
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Tony Garchinski said heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. the night of the meteor flyby he didn’t think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom’s truck with a huge crack in it.

It wasn’t until two weeks later that his mother, Yvonne Garchinski, heard media reports that researchers from Western were searching West Grimsby, Ontario for possible fragments of a freshly fallen meteorite. The Garchinskis realized who the real culprit was in the case of the broken windshield — or more specifically, what.

The ‘what’ was a 46-gram completely fusion-crusted (melted exterior) fragment of an ordinary chondrite meteorite. Chondrites are arguably the most important type of meteorite because they are the least processed of meteorites and provide a window into the material which formed the early solar system. The meteorite is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old.

Phil McCausland, a postdoctoral fellow at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science & Exploration said, “Having both the video and the sample is golden because we get the dynamic information and the orbital direction from the video, and by having recovered material on the ground, we can complete the picture. We can take a rock that we now have in hand and we can study it in the best laboratories in the world and we can put it back into its solar system context. We can put it back into where it came from.”

The Garchinski property is just 200 meters off the fall line of the meteorite the Western Meteor Physics Group calculated using data from its video, radar and sound detection systems and thanks in large part to this research – along with a lot of luck – two more meteorite fragments have been found.

The second meteorite was found by the Western team not far from the Garchinski home but the land owner wishes to remain anonymous. The third fragment was found Oct. 18 by professional meteorite hunter Mike Farmer (www.meteoriteguy.com) on the side of a road in West Grimsby.

The Western-led search continues and both Brown and McCausland believe more fragments will be found.

Source: Western University

A brilliant fireball seen over Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2009 was captured by seven all-sky cameras of the University of Western Ontario’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN.) The fireball was seen widely by observers throughout southern Ontario and adjacent areas. The fireball was first detected by Western’s camera systems at an altitude of 100km, and moving southeastwards at 20.8 km/s. From the data collected, the researchers believe the meteoroid was initially about a meter wide, or about the size of a child’s tricycle. At its brightest, the fireball was approximately 100 times as bright as the full moon.

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Researchers at Western are interested in hearing from anyone within 10 km of Grimsby, Ontario who may have witnessed or recorded this evening event, seen or heard unusual events at the time, or who may have found possible fragments of the freshly fallen meteorite.

The event occurred at 9:03 pm local time on Sept. 25, or 01:03 UT Sept. 26.

Analysis of the all-sky camera records as well as data from Western’s meteor radar and infrasound equipment indicates that this bright fireball was large enough to have dropped meteorites in a region south of Grimsby on the Niagara Peninsula, providing masses that may total as much as several kilograms.

To see more videos or images, or if you have questions, observations or possible meteorites check out Western’s website.