A sonic boom heard in California last week had an out-of-this globe origin as ”a significant meteoric event” according to NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. Scientists now estimate the blast measured in close to 5 kilotons or approximately 1/3 the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan for the duration of Globe War II.Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, estimates the object was about the size of a minivan, weighed in at close to 154,300 pounds.

“Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand and their trail lasts all of a second or two,” stated Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Fireballs you can see fairly effortlessly in the daytime and are numerous times that size – anyplace from a baseball-sized object to something as huge as a minivan.”

The meteor appears to be much far more beneficial than scientists first thought. Meteorite hunters identified fragments of the rock, identified by the “fusion crust” that forms when it burns in the atmosphere. NASA and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also mobilised a search team of about 30 scientists to search for the tiny black rocks. The meteorite turned out to be a really uncommon type of rock named CM chondrite, which can make up much less than 1 per cent of the meteorites that fall to Earth. According to Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama,  it is not clear regardless of whether it is uncommon simply because it easily burns up in the environment or there are just fewer of these rocks in space.

The Murchison meteorite, a big CM chondrite–one of the oldest kinds of rock in the universe– that made landfall in Australia in 1969, is now one of the most studied rocks in the globe.

---

Sources and more information:

• California meteorite is rare rock laden with organics

California meteorite is rare rock laden with organics 16:29 01 May 2012 by Sara Reardon For similar stories, visit the Solar System and Comets and Asteroids Topic Guides A meteorite that landed in northern California last week is much more valuable than scientists first thought. After the meteor was sighted streaking through the sky…

• California Meteor Found Packed With Alien Organics