WASHINGTON: Scientists at the US space agency NASA have discounted reports that an Indian bus driver in Tamil Nadu was killed by a meteorite, saying he was likely hit by a land based explosion.
Online photographs of the site of the suspected meteorite hit in a college campus on Saturday were more consistent with "a land based explosion" than with something from space, the New York Times reported Tuesday citing NASA scientists.
Early reports included images of a crater, five feet deep and two feet wide. Witnesses described hearing an explosion, and police recovered a black, pockmarked stone from the site in Vellore district of Tamil Nadu.
Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defence officer, told the US daily in an email that a death by meteorite impact was so rare that one has never been scientifically confirmed in recorded history.
"There have been reports of injuries, but even those were extremely rare before the Chelyabinsk event three years ago," she said, referring to a 2013 episode in Russia.
In addition, meteorites are often cool to the touch when they land, and the object recovered from the site in India weighed only a few grams and appeared to be a fragment of a common earth rock.
The US daily also cited a scientist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which is analysing samples of the rock provided by the police as doubting if it was a meteorite.
"Considering that there was no prediction of a meteorite shower and there was no meteorite shower observed, this certainly is a rare phenomena if it is a meteorite," professor G.C. Anupama, the dean of the institute, told the daily over telephone.
Deaths and injuries by meteorites are tracked by the International Comet Quarterly, which notes the locations and sizes of meteorites.
Some smash through houses, kill animals and spatter buildings. But deaths have been hard to confirm, the Times said.
In 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia, an apparent "airblast" of an object entering the Earth's atmosphere leveled hundreds of square miles of forest and killed two men and hundreds of reindeer. But no meteorites were recovered, the New York Times said citing the quarterly.
In one of the largest recent events, meteorites or pieces of space rock, fell in Chelyabinsk from a meteor that hit the Earth's atmosphere in February 2013.
About 1,200 people - 200 of them children - were injured, mostly by glass that exploded into schools and workplace's, the Times said, citing Russia's interior ministry.
Here are the notable casualties caused by the Meteorite fall in various parts of the world. (Source: International Comet Quarterly)
Date | Location | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 14 12 1807 | Weston, CT, USA | Meteor visible half a minute, loud sounds heard, many stones found scattered over 6-10 miles, weighing as much as 200 lbs. total (largest meteorite weighed 35 lbs) |
| 16 01 1825 | Oriang, Malwate, India | Man killed, woman injured in meteorite fall [considered "possible" by LaPaz (1958)] |
| 16 02 1827 | Mhow, India | Man wounded "severely in the arm" when hit by meteorite |
| 11 11 1836 | Macau, Brazil | Cattle killed when hit by shower of meteorites [considered "possible" by LaPaz (1958)] |
| 14 07 1847 | Hauptmannsdorf, Braunau, Bohemia | 37-pound Braunau iron meteorite smashed into a room, covering three children with ceiling debris but not hurting them |
| 01 05 1860 | New Concord, OH, USA | Horse struck and killed by meteorite |
| 08 08 1863 | Pillistfer, Latvia | 5.4-kg stony meteorite penetrated tile roof and floor of building |
| 30 01 1868 | Pultusk, Poland | Meteorite shower of more than 100,000 fragments |
| 03 02 1882 | Mocs, Romania | Meteorite shower of thousands of fragments |
| 02 05 1890 | Forest City, IA, USA | Meteorite shower of some 2000 fragments; one fragment fell into a pile of hay (no fire) |
| 02 09 1893 | Zabrodje, White Russia | 3-kg stony meteorite fell through house roof |
| 04 11 1906 | Constantia, South Africa | 1-kg stony meteorite smashed through roof and ceiling (2-pound piece recovered) |
| 05 09 1907 | Hsin-p-ai Wei, Weng-li, China | Meteorite caused a house to collapse, killing a family; evidently no evidence |
| 30 06 1908 | Tunguska, Siberia | Apparent airblast (no recovered meteorites) of an object entering Earth's atmosphere; leveled hundreds of square miles of forest, killing two men and hundreds of reindeer |
| 16 06 1911 | Kilbourn, WI, USA | 772-gm stony meteorite passed through roof and floorboard of barn, penetrated 2.5 inches into clay floor |
| 28 06 1911 | Nakhla, Egypt | Dog struck and killed by meteorite (part of meteorite shower) |
| 19 07 1912 | Holbrook, AZ, USA | Meteorite shower of more than 14000 fragments; meteorite fell a few meters from a person; largest fragment 9 pounds |
| 25 04 1915 | Ta-yang, east of Mai-po, China | Meteorite tore off a woman's arm; several meteorites, ranging from about 2 to about 3.5 kg |
| 18 01 1916 | Baxter, MO, USA | 611-gm stony meteorite penetrated roof of house |
| 31 12 1921 | Beyrout, Syria | 1.1-kg stony meteorite fell through hut roof |
| 06 07 1924 | Johnstown, CO, USA | Meteorites fell within a few feet of two men; 50-pound stone went 5 feet into wet soil |
| 28 04 1927 | Aba-mura, Inashiki-gun, Ibaragi-ken, Japan | Young girl suffered two head injuries when struck by a stony meteorite |
| 10 08 1932 | Archie, MO, USA | meteorite fell less than 1 m from person |
| 02 04 1936 | Yurtuk, Ukraine | 2-kg stony meteorite smashed hole in roof of house |
| 31 03 1938 | Kasamatsu, Japan | 721-gm stony meteorite penetrated house roof, landed on floor |
| 16 06 1938 | Pantar, Philippines | Numerous buildings hit by thousands of meteorites "as big as corn and rice grains" |
| 24 06 1938 | Chicora, PA, USA | Cow's hide injured, presumably by a fragment belonging to the meteorite shower in that area on that day |
| 29 09 1938 | Benld, IL, USA | Building and car hit by stony meteorites; the car was hit by a 4-pound fragment after it crashed through the roof of a garage, then through roof, seat, and floorboards of car |
| 12 02 1947 | Sikhote-Alin, south-eastern Siberia | Largest meteorite shower on record; estimated 100 tons of total debris fell, the largest weighing 1745 kg; some 9000 fragments weighing about 28 tons recovered; largest crater 28 m wide |
| 21 09 1949 | Beddgelert, N. Wales | 794-gm stony meteorite broke through roof and fell into hotel room |
| 20 09 1950 | Murray, KY, USA | Five buildings hit by meteorites |
| 10 12 1950 | St. Louis, MO, USA | Car hit by meteorite |
| 30 11 1954 | Sylacauga, AL, USA | Woman in home hit by meteorite after breaking through roof |
| 24 12 1965 | Barwell, England | Two buildings and a car hit by by meteorites |
| 08 04 1971 | Wethersfield, CT, USA | 12-ounce meteorite entered house through roof, lodged in living-room ceiling; ordinary chondrite; less than two miles away, another house was hit 11.5 yr later |
| 08 03 1976 | Jilin City, Jilin, China | Largest stony-meteorite shower in recent times; more than 100 fragments, the largest being 1770 kg in weight and making an impact crater 6 m deep; H5 chondrite |
| 31 01 1977 | Louisville, KY, USA | Three buildings and a car hit by meteorites |
| 08 11 1982 | Wethersfield, CT, USA | Meteorite entered house through roof; second house hit in same town in 11.5 years; L6 chondrite |
| 30 09 1984 | Binningup, WA, Australia | Meteorite fell 4-5 m from two sunbathers on soft beach sand |
| 10 12 1984 | Claxton, GA, USA | Mailbox hit by meteorite |
| 29 07 1986 | Kokubunji, Japan | Several buildings hit by meteorites |
| 31 08 1991 | Noblesville, IN, USA | Meteorite fell 3.5 m from two children outside; ordinary stony chondrite |
| 14 08 1992 | Mbale, Uganda | Meteorite shower; boy hit on head by 3.6-g fragment after it hit tree first |
| 09 10 1992 | Peekskill, NY, USA | Car hit by meteorite, which passed through steel trunk and impacted ground underneath; fireball widely visible and imaged along east coast |
| 10 12 1992 | Mihonoseki, Honshu, Japan | 6.5-kg L6 ordinary chondrite meteorite crashed through house to ground |
| 14 06 1994 | St-Robert, QC, Canada | Meteorite shower caused sonic boom in Montreal; scattered strewnfield in rural area; more than 25 kg recovered; H5 chondrite |
| 21 06 1994 | near Getafe, Spain | 12-cm-wide, 1.4-kg meteorite broke windshield and bent steering wheel of moving car, breaking finger of driver; more than 50 kg of meteorites found within 200 m of accident |
| 26 03 2003 | Chicago, IL, USA | Meteorite shower; buildings hit in Park Forest, IL; ordinary chondrites |
| 27 09 2003 | Mayurbhanj, Orissa, India | Bright fireball(s) lit up sky just after sunset; widely observed meteorite shower yielding numerous highly magnetic meteorites |
| 12 06 2004 | Ellerslie, suburban Auckland, N.Z. | 1.3-kg (2.8-lb) 7-cm x 13-cm meteorite broke through roof of house and bounced off sofa |
| 15 09 2007 | Carancas, Peru (near Lake Titicaca at alt. 3824 m) | 13.5-m-diameter crater created by mid-day visible fireball meteorite, numerous ordinary chondrites H4-5 recovered; made international news when local people complained of illness -- not yet definitively explained |
| 06 10 2008 | Nubian desert, northern Sudan (Almahata Sitta) | 47 meteorites weighing 3.95 kg were found in Dec. 2008 via a systematic search along the suspected debris path for the small minor planet 2008 TC3, discovered 20 hours prior to impact by R. A. Kowalski with the 1.5-m telescope at Mt. Lemmon in Arizona, when it was about 370000 miles from the earth; a bright fireball was seen by airline pilots and orbiting satellites when the object entered the Earth's atmosphere; the largest earth's atmosphere; the largest recovered meteorite weights 1.5 g (classified as a polymict ureilite, an achondrite) |
| 15 02 2013 | near Chelyabinsk, south-central Russia | Extremely bright fireball (apparent brightness rivalling that of the apparent brightness of the sun) entered atmosphere over Alaska and moving westward toward Chelyabinsk, near its termination point shortly before sunrise, creating a huge airblast shock that damaged thousands of buildings in Chelyabinsk (mostly broken glass) and injuring more than 1000 people; apparently meteorites were found in water under a large circular broken- ice feature found soon after the event |