Luckily for astronomers, it was a Friday night in the autumn. That meant that hundreds of thousands of people were at high school football games, many with camcorders at the ready to preserve any gridiron heroics. What they preserved as well, from at least 16 different locations from Kentucky to New York, was the path of a fireball across the sky as it streaked northeastward at better than ten miles a second.



(More videos of the event.)

As earth's atmosphere tightened its grip, the yard-wide meteor, which weighed several tons and shone brighter than the full moon, broke up into at least 70 pieces. The only piece ever found weighed about 28 pounds. It announced its arrival on planet Earth by crashing through the back of a car parked in Peekskill, New York, on the night of October 9, 1992, 15 years ago today.

The owner of the car, a red 1980 Chevy Malibu, was 17-year-old Michelle Knapp. She went outside with a friend to investigate the noise, and when they saw the damage to the car, they looked beneath it and discovered the meteorite, nestled in a small crater it had made in the driveway. It was still warm from its passage through the atmosphere. Knapp called the police, who inspected the car and filed a report of criminal mischief. (Given the extensive damage to the car (see photos here), the criminal class in Peekskill must have been very well-armed indeed for mischief to have been a plausible explanation.) The persistent smell of gasoline from the ruptured fuel tank brought the fire department as well. Thanks to the many videos available, astronomers were able to calculate the angle at which the meteoroid had hit the earth's atmosphere: 3.4 degrees. Had it been much shallower, it would have skimmed through the atmosphere and escaped back into space. (When in space, such an object is a meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere and is incandescent, it becomes a meteor. If it explodes or disintegrates in the atmosphere, it is termed a fireball or bolide. After the pieces land, they are called meteorites.)

Astronomers were even able to determine the path that the meteoroid had taken around the sun. For millions of years it had traveled as close as 80 million miles from the sun, inside the earth's orbit, and had reached out as far as nearly 200 million miles, well beyond Mars. It had taken 1.8 earth years to complete an orbit.

©Sara Eichmiller
A still photograph taken in Altoona, Pennsylvania, shows some of the fragments the meteor broke into.

In the early days of the solar system, four billion and more years ago, the earth was frequently bombarded with meteorites, many of them huge. The moon was almost certainly formed by a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-size object at that time. Even today, in the sedate middle age of the solar system, earth's considerable gravitational field sweeps up a lot of space junk as the planet orbits the sun. Every day the earth adds many tons to its mass this way. Most of it is in the form of dust, which simply slows up in the atmosphere without incandescing.

But so-called "shooting stars," which are about the size of grains of sand, can be seen on any clear night by the dozens from any spot on earth, if you have the patience to wait for them. During meteor showers, such as the Perseids in August and the Leonids in November, when the earth passes through the debris left in the orbits of comets, they can often be seen at a rate of more than one a minute, all seeming to come from the same point in the sky, called the radiant. Very rarely, a meteor storm is encountered, and shooting stars can be seen by the thousands, such as on the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, when at least a quarter of a million shooting stars were seen over North America.

Much rarer, fortunately, are the larger hunks of space debris that are too big to be vaporized in the upper atmosphere. These meteor falls are still surprisingly common, however. One landed in a field in Yorkshire, England, in 1795 and narrowly missed a worker. It settled the long-standing argument about whether stones really do fall from the sky.

In this country, a woman napping on her couch in her home in Sylacauga, Alabama, was struck by a meteorite on November 30, 1954, when it crashed through her roof, bounced off a radio, and hit her on the leg (see AmericanHeritage.com article here). Houses in Wethersfield, Connecticut, were struck by meteorites only 11 years apart, in 1971 and 1982.

Larger meteors pose graver, but exponentially rarer, dangers. The meteor that produced the Barringer Crater in northern Arizona about 50,000 years ago was roughly 50 yards wide and released about 2.5 megatons of energy to produce a crater nearly a mile wide and 570 feet deep. Such a meteor strikes the earth every thousand years or so.

The "Tunguska event," in 1908, was probably a comet that did not strike the earth but rather exploded in the atmosphere over unpopulated Siberia, with a force equal to that of a hydrogen bomb. It flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Had its path through space been very slightly different, it might have exploded over densely populated Europe, with catastrophic consequences.

A one-kilometer-wide meteor would cause globally devastating effects, but they hit only every half million years or so. A six-mile-wide meteor would end civilization and quite possibly annihilate the human race. One roughly that size is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There are now programs seeking to locate major asteroids and comets with earth-crossing orbits and develop ways of deflecting them, should they prove to be on a collision course.

The meteorite that slammed into Michelle Knapp's car had no such literally earthshaking consequences. Indeed, it proved a boon to Michelle Knapp. She told reporters that she had bought the 12-year-old car from her grandmother for only $100, and therefore the loss was small. But meteorites have a ready market, especially ones that achieve individual fame, often selling for thousands of dollars. (In fact, a fragment of the Peekskill meteorite, along with some video footage and pieces of the Malibu's smashed taillight, will be sold at auction later this month, with an estimated price of $2,000 to $3,000.) Knapp also sold the old clunker of a car, which later toured the world, for enough to buy a brand-new one.

So modest-size meteorites are invited to hit my car if they'd like to. As long as I'm not in it at the time, of course.