Meteorite Crashes Through New Zealand Roof

freitasm writes "The New Zealand Herald and Stuff are reporting on a 1.3kg, four billion-year-old rock that fell through the roof of a house in suburban Auckland, New Zealand. Their insurance company will pay for the hole in the roof and couch and two holes in the ceiling. The meteorite itself, a chunk of an asteroid, could have been basketball-sized when it impacted Earth's atmosphere at 15km a second. By the time it hit the house, its velocity had probably slowed to 100-200m a second."

Comments

why claim the insurance?

[drg55]

Meteorites are quite pricey, just put it on ebay.
Put the house on ebay too.

Could be a good thing?

[Chris_Jefferson]

Now at first, you'd think having a meteorite crashing through your roof was bad.

On the other hand, does this mean that these people now own the meteorite? and if so, does anyone have any idea how valuable it might be? Just courious :)

I'm pretty surprised by the loss in speed.

[James A. S. Joyce]

I know that the Earth's atmosphere is approximately 100 kilometres in thickness, but the idea of an object dissipating so much kinetic energy as heat is still amazing. Nonetheless, at that speed it's going at about the same speed as a bullet from a gun so I guess it's a good thing no one was there. Luckily, though, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, it's a good thing it lost all but literally 0.2% of its speed.

Re:Insurance?

[MinotaurUK]

IANAL, but I did do a course in contract law a few years ago. As I remember from the lectures on insurance contracts, "Act of God" doesn't mean things like meteors, storm damage, etc. at all. It's usually described as "unexplained natural phenomena", at least as far as insurance contracts go on this side of the pond.

Unusual though a meteor coming through the roof is, I'm not sure it counts as "unexplained".

It's not just you. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

is it just me, or have there been a lot of reports lately of 'large explosions' and 'bangs in the sky', and 'loud flashes of light in the distance', and pretty much they've all been meteorites?

There have been an increasing number of strikes over the past couple of years. Some, like this one, a half dozen instances back, are pretty darned significant. (Though, those ones suffer from a near total media black-out policy, while the smaller ones tend to get the typical, "Funny news, one in a billion, what WILL the insurance companies do, har har har! Go back to sleep, citizen" treatment). Those in power, however, are more or less aware and are preparing in their own ways. One theory suggests that the real reason behind the current world-wide military lock-down is not the 'Terrorism' bugaboo, but rather is to secure the population (and planet resources) for when things get really hairy. Look up Alternative '3' to get an idea. (Rather a cartoony distillation of the concept, but close enough to the real deal to be a relatively good primer on How Things Are.)

There appears to be a definite time-scale thingy going on here. Watch and listen. Almost everything of any significance going on in the world today is directly related to the sky falling tomorrow, so to speak. And most of it is reactionary, religion-based stupidity. We wouldn't have troops in Iraq, and Israel wouldn't be on a genocidal free-for-all if it wasn't for the 'Good' book. Ah, religion! Crack of the Masses.

Favorite news-bite of the week:

Madsen, a Washington-based writer and columnist, who often writes for Counterpunch, says that people close to the pope claim that amid these concerns, the pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations."

Though, don't fret. The big rocks aren't due to start whacking us for a little while yet. We'll probably get all the Harry Potter books out before. And thank goodness for that! (sic)

-FL