Death by Meteorite? India Tragedy May Be 1st
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Death by Meteorite? India Tragedy May Be 1st in Recorded History
For the first time in recorded history, a meteorite is reported to have killed a person.
The incident happened Saturday (Feb. 6) when an object, thought to be a meteorite, hit a college campus in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India,the Wall Street Journal reported. The impact killed a man and injured three others, the WSJ said.
Officials found a 4-feet-deep (1.2 meters) crater in the ground that contained "bluish black" rock fragments, G. Baskar, the college's principal in Tamil Nadu's Vellore district, told the WSJ. [When Space Attacks: The 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts]
But NASA has yet to confirm whether the mysterious object is indeed a meteorite. "Our Planetary Defense Coordination Office is aware of the reports and is looking into it," said Laurie Cantillo, a NASA spokeswoman. "So at this point the report is unconfirmed."
The impact occurred at 12:30 p.m. local time (2 a.m. E.T.) Saturday, when a bus driver was standing on the grass near the college's cafeteria,according to Reuters. The driver, a 40-year-old man named Kamaraj, was killed, and a student and two gardeners standing nearby were injured, the WSJ reported.
"There was a noise like a big explosion," Baskar told the WSJ. "It was an abnormal sound that could be heard till at least 3 kilometers [about 2 miles] away."
The explosion broke windows in neighboring classrooms and cars, and prompted college officials to cancel classes until Wednesday (Feb. 10), the WSJ said. Meanwhile, J. Jayalalithaa, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, announced that the driver's family would receive 100,000 rupees ($1,470) and those injured would get 25,000 rupees ($368) in compensation, the WSJ reported.
If scientists confirm that a meteorite — and not space junk or other debris — led to the man's death, this would be the first scientifically proven meteorite fatality in modern times, NASA said.
"It is so rare, there has never been a scientifically confirmed report of someone being killed by a meteorite impact in recorded history," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, told Live Science in an email. "There have been reports of injuries, but even those were extremely rare before the Chelyabinsk event three years ago."
A meteorite wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, leaving the gaping Chicxulub crater in Mexico; and other meteorites have hit Earth throughout the years, including the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite that injured about 1,000 people. However, most meteorites land in remote places, including a 3.5-lb. (1.6 kilograms) rock researchers found in the Australian Outback shortly after it crash-landed on Earth on Nov. 27, 2015.
There is evidence that space rocks once bombarded Earth and the moon about 3.9 billion years ago, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But "since that time, cratering appears to have continued at a much slower and fairly uniform rate," the JPL said.
Comets and asteroids continue to pockmark Earth when they become meteorites, or space rocks that survive the plunge through the planet's atmosphere and land on Earth. But most meteors burn up high in the atmosphere, leaving streaks that people call shooting stars.
However, larger space rocks do sometimes make landfall. People saw a fireball streak across the sky from Kentucky to New York on Oct. 9, 1992. Researchers found the remains, a 27-lb. (12 kg) meteorite that punched a hole in a parked car, in Peekskill, New York, the JPL reported.
There are ancient Chinese records of meteorites causing human deaths, but there have been no human fatalities reported in the past 1,000 years, the JPL said. Still, meteorites have injured some people, includingAlabama housewife Ann Hodges, who awoke from a nap on her couch when a 3-lb. (1.4 kg) meteorite fell through her house and bruised her hip.
"An individual's chance of being killed by a meteorite is small," the JPL said. "But the risk increases with the size of the impacting comet or asteroid."
It may be too late for the dinosaurs, but today, scientists are mapping near-Earth objects to learn which space rocks pose the most danger to Earth, the JPL said.
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Blueish black rock???
I know liao~
it must be orh-cheh aka bruised from the fall ~
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Meteorite not responsible for killing man in India: NASA
NEW DELHI (AFP) - NASA on Wednesday said it was unlikely a meteorite was responsible for killing a man at a college campus in India last week, as local scientists continued to examine the mysterious object recovered from the scene.
Authorities in southern Tamil Nadu state had claimed that a meteorite fatally struck a bus driver and injured three others on Saturday.
After reviewing photographic evidence, the US space agency said that they did not believe the object was a meteorite.
"While more details are forthcoming from local scientists, this is unlikely something from space," Dwayne Brown, a NASA spokesman, said in a statement.
"To form a crater the size of what has been posted online would have required a meteorite of at least several kilogrammes," he said.
Local officials recovered a blue object, which was roughly smaller than an adult hand, near the accident site and claimed it had left a crater in the ground. The college also reported that buildings on the campus were damaged during the incident.
Two days after the episode, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram said the unknown object was a meteorite, triggering an international debate.
GC Anupama of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, which sent a team to examine the object, said the group has not finished their investigation yet.
"The team has received a sample from the local police investigating the event. The nature of the object will be ascertained only after a detailed analyses by the experts," said Anupama, the dean of the institute.
Meteors are particles of dust and rock that usually burn up as they pass through Earth's atmosphere.
Those that do not burn up completely, surviving the fall to Earth, are known as meteorites.
In February 2013 a meteorite plunged over Russia's Ural Mountains, creating a shockwave that injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes.