Peekskill meteorite: the car-crushing fall caught on video

On 9 October 1992, a 12.4-kilogram meteorite punched through the rear of a parked 1980 Chevrolet Malibu in Peekskill, New York, and the fireball that delivered it became the first meteorite fall ever captured on moving pictures.

The car belonged to Michelle Knapp, 18, who was watching television when she heard a crash outside. She found a hole through the car, a matching hole in the gravel driveway and a heavy, warm stone that smelled of sulfur. The next day a curator from the American Museum of Natural History confirmed it was a meteorite: an H6 ordinary chondrite, from the inner edge of the main asteroid belt.

What made it famous was the video. The fireball was first seen over West Virginia just before 8 pm and travelled about 700 kilometres northeast, breaking apart as it went. It was a Friday night, and people filming high-school football games swung their cameras skyward. In Nature in 1994, Peter Brown and colleagues analysed 14 video recordings, the first motion pictures of a fireball whose meteorite was recovered, and used them to work out the rock’s ground path and its orbit around the Sun. The University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute notes that Peekskill was only the fourth recovered meteorite with detailed trajectory data.

The footage also shows how quietly the journey ended. Below about 30 kilometres the stone stopped glowing and fell in “dark flight” for another 50 kilometres, striking the car at only about 80 metres per second.

Meteorites are not rare, but direct hits are, because a car is a tiny target on a large planet: as far as scientists knew, one had been hit only twice before, once in Illinois in the 1930s and once in St. Louis. The battered Malibu sold for $10,000 to Lang’s Fossils and Meteorites and has since been shown in New York, Paris, Munich and Tokyo.