A object from spcae hit NRI's home is not a meteorite

New York, May 11, 2007
Nancy Khurana

On Jan. 2, 2007, NRI Srinivasan Nageswaran's house was hit by silvery rock that tore a hole in the roof and landed on the bathroom. Srinivasan went into his bathroom and saw the hole in the ceiling along with chunks of drywall and insulation scattered around the area.

He cleand his bathroom and found a metallic sparkly rock about the size of a golf ball almost 13 ounces. Two geologists from Rutgers University and an independent metallurgist confirmed that the rock was an iron meteorite.

Nageswaran's mother, who has been staying with the family said that she had heard a loud boom a few hours earlier and thought it was New Year's fireworks explosion.

In April, it was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where a new variable-pressure scanning electron microscope was used to establish its composition.

On Fiday, scientists said: It was not a meteorite after all, but probably a piece of space junk and the silvery object was made of a stainless-steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely "orbital debris" — part of a satellite, rocket or some other spacecraft

There are about 50 extraterrestrial rocks crash on Earth regularly and rarely strikes homes. There had been about 5,000 meteorites found over the surface of the Earth.