A meteorite crashed through a parked car in Peekskill

On the evening of October 9, 1992, a brilliant fireball streaked across the eastern United States, witnessed and videotaped by thousands at Friday-night football games. Minutes later, a stone weighing more than 12 kilograms (about 26 pounds) punched through the trunk of a parked 1980 Chevrolet Malibu in Peekskill, New York, coming to rest in a small crater in the driveway.

The car belonged to Michelle Knapp, an 18-year-old who had bought it secondhand for a few hundred dollars. According to Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies, the rock is an H6 ordinary chondrite — debris from the asteroid belt roughly 4.5 billion years old.

The amateur videos let scientists reconstruct the meteorite’s orbit — a rare feat at the time.

The battered Malibu became more valuable than ever, touring museums as the Peekskill meteorite car, while fragments of the stone were prized by collectors and researchers alike.