Meteors are more common than you probably thinking (and meteor showers far less exciting). Watch the night sky for more than 10 minutes or so and you’re almost guaranteed to see one. In fact, a radio communications system – meteor burst communications – successfully uses the ionized trails of meteors.
Meteorites impact with surprising frequency, too. The Earth accumulates five to 300 tonnes of extraterrestrial material every day.
Most of that material, though, is in the form of fine cosmic dust. The sort of big bad rocks that wipe out dinosaurs are (fortunately) much, much, much rarer. Still, even small pebbles hit the Earth almost every day.
The trick, though, is being in the right place at the right time to see it (if such is your wish). The proliferation of cameras, especially dashcams and similar devices, has meant that meteor fireballs are captured on video more frequently each year. But in a first, a home security camera in Canada last year captured the moment of impact of a meteor for the first time in history.
Joe Velaidum of Marshfield, in Prince Edward Island, had fortunately just left to take his dogs for a walk when a tiny meteorite smacked with incredible force into his front porch.
“The shocking thing for me is that I was standing right there a couple of minutes right before this impact,” Velaidum told CBC News.
“If I’d have seen it, I probably would’ve been standing right there, so it probably would’ve ripped me in half.”
Luckier still, his home security camera caught both video and audio of the meteorite’s crash landing.
Velaidum isn’t exaggerating about the consequences of being in the meteorite’s path. To recap basic physics, kinetic energy is a function of mass and velocity. At the speed at which the meteorite impacted – likely at least 200 km/h, about a tenth the speed of a modern bullet – even a small pebble will pack a deadly punch.
The lucky Canuck only noticed something unusual when he got home and saw debris on the path and lawn. When he checked his home security footage, he was shocked to see what appeared to be a small explosion right where he’d been standing minutes earlier.
A friend advised him that the object could have been a meteorite, so he began collecting samples of the debris.
When they sent some fragments to the University of Alberta at Edmonton, meteorite collection curator Chris Herd confirmed that it was indeed a meteorite.
Between Velaidum and Herd, about 95 grams of fragments were collected from the crash site in total.
Analysis confirmed the samples to be from an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of space rock that strikes this planet […]
But as far as his research has found, there has never been recorded audio from such a collision with a man-made object […]
It’s really awesome. It’s actually the first and only meteorite ever found on the Island, and what a way to make that discovery,” Herd said. “Every time that this happens, it’s a new sample from space. It’s from the asteroid belt… between Mars and Jupiter, so it’s come a long way.”
And if its timing had been just a little bit different, it could all have worked out a lot worse for Joe Velaidum or his dogs. Instead, he’s fortunate enough to, as he says, ponder the whole thing “with wonder and with awe”.
