Posted By Matthew Van Dongen, Standard Staff
Updated 7 days ago

The police report was half right.

When Yvonne Garchinski complained a stone-throwing vandal had smashed the windshield of her Nissan Pathfinder three weeks ago, the responding police officer wrote in his notes that the offending rock “was not from the property.”

Try not from the planet.

It turns out the Grimsby woman’s suspected vandal was actually an alien invader: 46 grams of speeding space rock no bigger than a golf ball that slammed into the family SUV.

Now Yvonne and son Tony are the surprised owners of a new windshield — and five tiny, black and silver fragments of shattered meteorite.

“I thought it was vandalism for sure,” Tony told a phalanx of reporters crowded onto the driveway of his Leawood Drive home Friday. “Who thinks a meteorite is going to crash-land on your car?”

Neither mother nor son noticed the fiery meteor that streaked across southern Ontario’s skies Sept. 25 at a speed of 75,000 kilometres an hour.

Tony was watching a movie that night and didn’t hear the dramatic landing that crushed the passenger side of the Pathfinder’s windshield and dented the nearby garage door.

The irritated family called police the next day, gathered up the “strange-looking” rock fragments as evidence and paid $220 to replace their windshield.

Meanwhile, the stargazing scientific community was buzzing over spectacular footage of the blinding meteor, recorded by cameras operated by the University Western Ontario’s physics and astronomy department.

But as astro-enthusiasts searched the fields of Grimsby, five tiny pieces of meteorite “just sat on a table on our porch for days and days,” Tony said.

After seeing the meteor footage on television, Yvonne called UWO astrophysicist Phil McCausland, who verified the tiny rocks were out of this world.

“They’re probably the oldest rocks that you or I or just about anyone else will ever hold,” said a grinning McCausland, carefully gripping black-coated space pebble in a gloved hand. “We’re talking 4.6 billion years old.”

The partially melted space pebbles, called “ordinary chondrites,” are incredibly valuable to the scientific community.

Chondrites are an important type of meteorite, said experts, because they represent a window into the earliest ingredients of the solar system. “This is like we sent a spacecraft out to a specific location to bring back a sample, only in this case the sample came to us,” said associate professor Peter Brown, an expert in the study of meteors at UWO.

The meteor is particularly rare because scientists have now tracked it from the solar system all the way to the ground, McCausland added.

“Only about a dozen meteor falls in history have that kind of record.”

But does it have a cash value?

That’s tough to say, according to Brown. He likened meteorites to antiques — “they’re more valuable because of the story attached to them.”

There are dozens of purported space rocks for sale on eBay. A penny-sized rock that supposedly fell in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1969 will cost you at least $31 today, while a fist-sized specimen found “by nomads in the Sahara desert” is closing in on $200.

The Garchinski family owns the meteorite fragments, but they’ve agreed to loan them to university researchers for three months.

After that, Yvonne said the space rocks will go into a safety deposit box while the family decides whether to sell or keep them.

In the meantime, McCausland said the meteorite search is still on.

He thinks “kilogram-sized chunks” may still be found in the surrounding area. The Garchinski property is within 200 meters off the meteorite “fall line” calculated by experts using data from video, radar and sound detection systems.

“I expect we’ll have more (search) volunteers now,” he said.

Attention meteorite hunters:

• Meteorites often have a dark and scalloped exterior, are usually denser than normal rock and will often attract a fridge magnet due to metal content. Meteorites may be found in a small hole caused by their impact.

• Meteorites are not dangerous, but should be placed in a clean plastic bag or container and be handled as little as possible to preserve their scientific information.

Meteorites belong to the owners of the property where they land.

http://beta.stcatharinesstandard.ca/Articl....aspx?e=2133932

Who says 'Money can't fall from the sky', good story. :coverlaugh:

Okieboy

I thought I had heard every story there was about auto glass breaking, but this takes the cake

I'll bet you have heard some good ones. Please share some of the strange and wacky ones with us.

Asteroid 2009 DD45 Just Misses Earth
This asteroid was only found 2 days before its closest approach

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has reported an asteroid that just missed the earth on Monday morning. The asteroid, named 2009 DD45 was only 48,000 miles from Earth when it zoomed past. That is only two times as long as some telecommunications satellites and perhaps one-fifth of the Moon’s distance from Earth. It is incredibly close by astronomical terms though and could have spelled potential disaster.

The asteroid measured between 69 and 154 feet in diameter making it the same size as the space ball that blasted into Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 and razed to the ground forest land covering more than 800 square miles. That is an area much larger than Greater London. The asteroid was noticed only two days ago and at its closest point to Earth passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti. It was noticed on Saturday and passed by the earth on Monday.

Rob McNaught from Australia’s Siding Spring Observatory mentioned that the asteroid was not a threat but had it been close to collision with Earth there would be at least 24 hours warning so people could evacuate safely. There are nearly 1000 such astronomical bodies that are considered potential threats. A 300-meter asteroid hitting the earth could have changed the face of the earth triggering off a global winter for a year’s time and a kilometer long asteroid could mean disaster everywhere in the world.

If the asteroid were to hit the earth it would have exploded with the severity of a nuclear blast and it is shocking that humans had only three days notice to monitor its path. The asteroid may return again in the future if it is drawn in by the earth’s gravity


Read more: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-te...l#ixzz0VGJFVsd8

I'll see your miss...and raise you a hit...
______________________________________

ASTEROID 32.8 FEET HITS INDONESIA- BLAST 3X HIROSHIMA RESULTS
INDONESIAN ASTEROID: Picture this: A 10-meter wide asteroid hits Earth and explodes in the atmosphere with the energy of a small atomic bomb. Frightened by thunderous sounds and shaking walls, people rush out of their homes, thinking that an earthquake is in progress. All they see is a twisting trail of debris in the mid-day sky:

This really happened on Oct. 8th around 11 am local time in the coastal town of Bone, Indonesia. The Earth-shaking blast received remarkably little coverage in Western press, but meteor scientists have given it their full attention. "The explosion triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) more than 10,000 km away," report researchers Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown of the Univ. of Western Ontario in an Oct. 19th press release. Their analysis of the infrasound data revealed an explosion at coordinates 4.5S, 120E (close to Bone) with a yield of about 50 kton of TNT. That's two to three times more powerful than World War II-era atomic bombs.

The asteroid that caused the blast was not known before it hit and took astronomers completely by surprise. According to statistical studies of the near-Earth asteroid population, such objects are expected to collide with Earth on average every 2 to 12 years. "Follow-on observations from other instruments or ground recovery efforts would be very valuable in further refining this unique event," say Silber and Brown.

WOW!! And nothing on the news, unless I missed it. :newlmao:

Nope, nothing on the regular MSM at all, unless I just haven't seen it. :naw: