Posted on 01/16/2025 11:00:42 AM PST by Red Badger
The impact was captured using a door camera.
Image credit: Compass Media/Joe Velaidum
For possibly the first time ever, a meteorite has been captured on video and audio as it struck the Earth, just outside one man's home.
Joe Velaidum, of Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada, was standing outside his home last July, before setting off for a walk with his dog. If he had lingered a little longer, he may have become the second person in history to have been confirmed to be hit by a meteorite.
"It is surreal to think about just rare and how close this encounter was. I was standing right at the point of impact, just minutes prior," Velaidum told Compass Media.
“My partner Laura and I decided to take the dogs for a quick walk. There was nothing unusual about that at all. Except that I stopped on the walkway to move a dog leash because the landscapers were scheduled to come and mow the lawn later that day, and the dog leash was on the grass. So I thought I would help. I never stop in that spot."
“In retrospect, if I had stayed in that exact spot for just a minute or two longer, I would certainly have been hit by a meteor and probably would have been killed. So, when I was innocently moving that dog lead, a meteor was hurling towards me."
Fortunately, Velaidum and his dogs were clear of the area when the meteorite struck, and he did not know anything was up until he returned from his walk and found strange dark debris on the floor. Checking his door camera, he found that there was footage of the moment the debris was deposited, and it looked an awful lot like a meteor impact. Astonishingly, in several frames of the video before impact, you can see the meteorite falling to Earth.
VIDEO AT LINK.............
After Laura's father suggested that the small explosion could be a meteorite impact, Velaidum diligently collected samples of the debris, sending around 7 grams (0.24 ounces) of it to Chris Herd, the University of Alberta's meteorite collection curator.
Though the Earth doesn't make a fuss about it, every day it is bombarded with around 44,000 kilograms (48.5 tons) of meteoritic material. Most of it burns up harmlessly in our atmosphere, but some material does make it to the ground, where its composition can be studied. Looking at the samples sent to him, and further samples he and Velaidum collected from the area, Herd determined that they were chondrite, the oldest known rocks whose components formed during the birth of the Solar System.
“It’s mind blowing to think that this hunk or rock travelled hundreds of millions of miles and landed on our front doorstep where I was standing, exactly, a few minutes prior," Velaidum added.
While the most common type of meteorite, the overall incident is extremely rare. Why? Well, it may just be the only time we have captured video and audio of a meteorite hitting the ground.
"It's not anything we've ever heard before," Herd told CBC News. "From a science perspective, it's new."
"No other meteorite fall has been documented like this, complete with sound,” he added in a University of Alberta statement. “It adds a whole new dimension to the natural history of the Island.”
According to Herd, the meteorite was likely traveling around 60,000 kilometers per hour (37,282 miles per hour) as it entered the atmosphere, before slowing down to a terminal velocity of around 200 kilometers per hour (124 miles per hour) before hitting the ground. Luckily for Velaidum, that came a few minutes after he had left the area.
Ping!.................DUCK!..................
Reminds me of someone “capturing” in a photo the bullet grazing Trump in Butler PA.
Some one up there has it in for the dogwalker.
I wonder what would happen if one hits an airplane. The meteor will be going much faster in the thin air, so it could potentially go right through.
That little dustup between 1939 and 1945 gave us a whole lot of information about what happens when you poke big holes in airplanes.
saw the smoke but not the impact...
Did this occur outside of a dog walking business that he owns with a woman named Laura?
I wonder what his wife thought about the whole thing when she heard about it.
... or lots of little ones...............
WOW, awesome!!
As long as it doesn’t land in Chino Hills, we’re good.
The Great Chicago Fire may have been started by a meteorite, not a cow............
I actually had a retired 747 TWA pilot tell me he believed TWA 800 was brought down by a meteor.
“I wonder what would happen if one hits an airplane.
A few have suggested that a meteor may have brought down Flight 800 from JFK to Rome. Not everyone buys the NTSB report that it was the center gas tank. I attended a seminar on this discussion.
I was thinking that very thing! But there are other odd things that the plane did, such as flying the wrong way and not responding to its radio, which suggests it was something else. But we still don’t know for sure. I was watching a youtube video saying the mystery was solved, but after 10 minutes of wasting my time it said “we still don’t know”. I gave it a thumbs down review.
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