The Sylacauga meteorite: Mrs Hodges Struck and wounded

This image shows Ms Ann Hodges in hospital and clearly shows the severe bruising caused by the meteorite.

NB: An impact crater is called an "astrobleme."

Credit: Jay Leviton, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

60 years ago today, at 2:46 p.m. local time, a meteor burned over Sylacauga, Alabama.

Normally, this wouldn't be news, except that this fragment of interplanetary debris was pretty big, probably massing dozens of kilograms.

It broke up high over the ground, creating a fireball bright enough to be witnessed across three states.

Most of it became vapour and very small chunks, but one piece, with a mass of 3.9 kilos (8.5 pounds), survived its atmospheric entry.

Falling at terminal velocity, a couple of hundred kilometers per hour, it made it all the way to the ground.

Kinda, there were two things in its way: A house, and Ms Ann Hodges.

The rock (Sylacauga meteorite) slammed into the house, punching a hole in the roof.

Still moving rapidly, it hit a radio (at the time, a pretty large piece of furniture), careered off, and smacked into the hand and hip of Ms. Ann Hodges, who was napping on the couch nearby.

It left a fierce bruise on her side that. This event is the most well-documented case of a human hit by a meteorite in history.

Some believe the real story happened after Hodges was hit. There are some fairly complete articles about the aftermath at the Encyclopedia of Alabama and the Decatur Daily.

Basically, there was a big tussle over who owned the meteorite. Hodges and her husband were renting the house from one Birdie (or Bertie) Guy.

This picture shows the hole in the ceiling and the meteorite fragment held in the policeman's hand.

Mrs Hodges is standing next to the policeman.

Credit: Jay Leviton, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Legally, Guy owned the meteorite, since it landed on her property, but public opinion, unsurprisingly, sided with Hodges to keep it.

The legal wrestling went on for some time until Guy gave up the lawsuit, but by that time interest had waned, and no one wanted to buy the rock.

Hodges initially used it as a doorstop but eventually she donated it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where it’s still on display in the Smith Hall, alongside the State Fossil of Alabama: Basilosaurus cetoides.

Meteorite Captured Exploding in Earth atmosphere - Video

Photographer Wes Eisenhauer has taken some pretty extraordinary footage of the night sky you’ll want to see.

While filming a timelapse of the Milky Way Galaxy on October 16, Eisenhauer captured a fireball in the sky that seemed to spontaneously explode.

This incredible phenomenon is actually known as a bolide (meaning missile in Greek), which is basically a meteorite that explodes, leaving behind a red dust trail.

But if you watch closely, after this fireball explodes, it leaves a heavenly halo in its wake-it’s definitely something you need to see to believe.

3 Meteorites from 2013 Chelyabinsk Explosion Over Russia, for Sale

A fragments of the Feb. 15, 2013, Russian meteorite will hit the auction block this month.

Credit: Heritage Auctions

When a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013, many of world's most avid meteorite collectors were gathered on the other side of the world, in Arizona, at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.

"A lot of the meteorite guys were scrambling to leave the show early to go to Russia," said Craig Kissick of Heritage Auctions.

This month, Heritage Auctions is selling three pieces of the Chelyabinsk space rock as part of its latest natural history sale.



The meteor blast produced a shockwave that shattered windows and injured more than 1,000 people in Chelyabinsk region.

Scientists who have analyzed samples of the Chelyabinsk meteorite have said it appears to be an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of meteorite found on Earth.

"I wouldn't consider it that attractive," Kissick said, but the fragments have stirred up interest among collectors because they are tied to the biggest meteorite blast in more than a century, and perhaps the most witnessed one on record.

Opening bids for the three Chelyabinsk meteorite fragments start at $500, $2,500 and $4,000. The sale will take place on Sept. 28 at Heritage Auction's Nature and Science Signature Auction in Dallas, Texas.

Infrasonic Detection of Meteorites - Video

Infrasound arrays at an infrasound station at Qaanaaq, Greenland, part of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring system 

Credits: CTBT Organization

In the early morning hours of November 17, 1998, a bright fireball was observed over northern New Mexico, about 150km away from Los Alamos.

The bolide was part of the annual Leonid meteor shower. Although the event did not produce any sonic boom reports, it was detected by an infrared radiometer and by an intensified camera located in the state.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) investigated the sighting in its role as a part of the International Monitoring System (IMS) created following the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

LANL found the presence of an infrasonic signal detected by six infrasound arrays. The signal matched the time and the direction of the fireball seen in the sky.

The infrasound recording indicated that the explosion occurred at 93.5 kilometer, matching the measurements from the camera.

The velocity obtained for the bolide from the signal was between 920 and 1150km/s. The meteorite was calculated to have a source energy equivalent to about 1.14 tons of TNT, where source energy is the kinetic energy when the shock wave is produced because of the passage through the atmosphere or the fragmentation of the meteoroid itself.

To detect nuclear explosions, IMS employs infrasound stations using microbarographs (acoustic pressure sensors) to detect very low frequency sound waves.

The investigation conducted by Douglas O. Revelle and Rodney W. Withaker at LANL showed that these detectors could also have been used to detect and measure objects entering the atmosphere.

According to Revelle, an array of low frequency sensors horizontally separated by a few hundred meters to a few kilometers can be used to determine both the direction and the elevation angle of the signals.

The determination uniquely locates the infrasound sources in a three-dimensional space within the atmosphere within certain errors.

Such data are also useful to estimate the frequency of occurrence of certain types of meteoroids. Revelle estimates that an event with the energy level of 10Mt, such as Tunguska, is likely to happen once every 120 years.

However, data from infrasound measurements reported that 30 ±9 large bolides with an energy level of 0.1kt are likely to enter Earth’s atmosphere every year.

The data shows that the number of entering debris increases as the source energy decreases and vice versa.

Historically, the primary source of data collection for reentering objects has always been visual or optical observations.

However, due to the extensive deployment of ILS infrasound sensors, this mode has shown its relevance along with radar and optical observation for the study of meteor physics.

The Los Alamos investigation was one of the first times that infrasound detection has been used to study objects reentering the atmosphere.

Revelle’s pioneering theoretical work on interaction between meteors and atmosphere led the way for future studies.

Another Bolide Meteor explodes over Russia - Video

Why does Russia seem to get so many bright meteors?

Well at 6.6 million square miles it's by far the largest country in the world plus, with dashboard-mounted cameras being so commonplace (partly to help combat insurance fraud).

Statistically it makes sense that Russians would end up seeing more meteors, capture the event on video and share the experience with the rest of the world!

This is exactly what happened early this morning, April 19 (local time), when a bright fireball flashed in the skies over Murmansk, located on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia near the border of Finland.

Luckily not nearly as large or powerful as the Chelyabinsk meteor event from February 2013, no sound or air blast from this fireball has been reported and nobody was injured.

Details on the object aren't yet known… it could be a meteor (most likely) or it could be re-entering space debris.



The video above, some of which was captured by Alexandr Nesterov from his dashcam, shows the object dramatically lighting up the early morning sky.

One Russian astronomer suggests this bolide may have been part of the debris that results in the Lyrid meteor shower, which peaks on April 22-23.

Russian Meteor Impact: What is known? Technical Details

The large fireball (technically, a "superbolide") observed on the morning of February 15, 2013 in the skies near Chelyabinsk, Russia, was caused by a relatively small asteroid approximately 17 to 20 meters in size, entering the Earth's atmosphere at high speed and a shallow angle.

In doing so it released a tremendous amount of energy, fragmented at high altitude, and produced a shower of pieces of various sizes that fell to the ground as meteorites.

The fireball was observed not only by video cameras and low frequency infra-sound detectors, but also by U.S. Government sensors.

As a result, the details of the impact have become clearer. There is no connection between the Russian fireball event and the close approach of asteroid 2012 DA14, which occurred just over 16 hours later.

New Fireball Data
U.S. Government sensor data on fireballs are now reported on the NASA Near-Earth Object Program Office website.

The February 15th event is the first entry on this new site, and it provides the following information about the fireball:

• Date and time of maximum brightness: 15 Feb. 2013/03:20:33 GMT
• Geographic location of maximum brightness: Latitude: 54.8 deg. N :: Longitude: 61.1 deg. E
• Altitude of maximum brightness: 23.3 km (14.5 miles)
• Velocity at peak brightness: 18.6 km/s (11.6 miles/s)
• Approximate total radiated energy of fireball: 3.75 x 10^14 Joules. This is the equivalent of about 90 kilotons (kt) of TNT explosives, but it does not represent the total impact energy (see note below).
• Approximate total impact energy of the fireball in kilotons of TNT explosives (the energy parameter usually quoted for a fireball): 440 kt.

Note that the total energy of a fireball event is several times larger than the observed total radiated energy.

The JPL fireballs website uses the following empirical formula derived by Peter Brown and colleagues to convert the optical radiant energy Eo into an estimate of the total impact energy E (see: Brown et al., The flux of small near-Earth objects colliding with the Earth. Nature, vol. 420, 21 Nov. 2002, pp. 294-296):.

E = 8.2508 x E_o ^0.885

During the atmospheric entry phase, an impacting object is both slowed and heated by atmospheric friction.

In front of it, a bow shock develops where atmospheric gases are compressed and heated. Some of this energy is radiated to the object causing it to ablate, and in most cases, to break apart.

Fragmentation increases the amount of atmosphere intercepted and so enhances ablation and atmospheric braking.

The object catastrophically disrupts when the force from the unequal pressures on the front and back sides exceeds its tensile strength.

This was an extraordinarily large fireball, the most energetic impact event recognized since the 1908 Tunguska blast in Russian Siberia.

The meteorites recovered from the Chelyabinsk fireball are reported to be ordinary chondrites, which have a typical density of about 3.6 g/cm^3.

Given the total energy of about 440 kt, the approximate effective diameter of the asteroid would be about 18 meters, and its mass would be roughly 11,000 tons.

NB: All estimates of total energy, diameter and mass are very approximate.