A object
from spcae hit NRI's home is not a meteorite
New York, May 11, 2007
Nancy Khurana
On Jan. 2, 2007, NRI Srinivasan Nageswaran's house
was hit by silvery rock that tore a hole in the roof and landed
on the bathroom. Srinivasan went into his bathroom and saw the hole
in the ceiling along with chunks of drywall and insulation scattered
around the area.
He cleand his bathroom and found a metallic sparkly
rock about the size of a golf ball almost 13 ounces. Two geologists
from Rutgers University and an independent metallurgist confirmed
that the rock was an iron meteorite.
Nageswaran's mother, who has been staying with the
family said that she had heard a loud boom a few hours earlier and
thought it was New Year's fireworks explosion.
In April, it was taken to the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, where a new variable-pressure scanning electron
microscope was used to establish its composition.
On Fiday, scientists said: It was not a meteorite
after all, but probably a piece of space junk and the silvery object
was made of a stainless-steel alloy that does not occur in nature
and is most likely "orbital debris" — part of a
satellite, rocket or some other spacecraft
There are about 50 extraterrestrial rocks crash on
Earth regularly and rarely strikes homes. There had been about 5,000
meteorites found over the surface of the Earth.
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