Martian Meteorites on Earth

LIMA, Peru - A supposed meteorite that crashed in southern Peru over the weekend has caused hundreds of people to suffer headaches, nausea and respiratory problems, a health official said Tuesday.

Local media have reported eyewitness accounts of a fiery ball falling from the sky and smashing into the desolate Andean plain near the Bolivian border Saturday morning. Officials have said it was a meteorite.

Around midnight on March 26, hundreds of meteorites rained on the Chicago suburbs of Park Forest and Olympia Fields, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of downtown. The larger meteorites punched holes in roofs and dented cars. One meteorite embedded itself in the Park Forest fire station.

"We were asleep when it happened," says Phillip Jones, a retired electrical designer who lives in Olympia Fields. "My youngest granddaughter came into our room saying she had heard a noise but we told her she was dreaming and to go back to sleep." The next morning, Jones found a foot-wide (30-centimeter) hole in the ceiling-then a second hole through the kitchen floor into the basement.

"There are a number of stories of people being injured, and even killed, by meteorites. The most celebrated case was that of Mrs. Hulitt Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama. On the 30 March 1954 Mrs. Hodges was asleep on her sofa when a 3.86 kg (8.51 lbs) stony meteorite crashed though her roof and hit her, causing abdominal injuries which, fortunately, were not serious.

The funny thing about the incident - although she probably did not find it amusing at the time - is that Mrs. Hodges lived opposite the Comet Drive-In Theatre. The photograph shows Mrs. Hodges shortly after the malevolent meteorite struck her. It caused extensive bruising which took a number of weeks to disappear."

The Nakhla meteorite, the first and eponymous example of a Nakhlite type meteorite of the SNC Group type of meteorites, fell to Earth, from Mars, on the 28th of June, 1911, at approximately 09:00 in the Nakhla region of Abu Hommos, Alexandria, Egypt.[1][2][3] The meteorite fell in forty pieces and was witnessed by many individuals to have exploded in the upper atmosphere and to have fallen into the ground, the fragments burying themselves up to a meter in depth in some places.

One such fragment of the Nakhla meteorite was said to be observed by a farmer named Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim in the village of Denshal, near Nakhla, to have landed, not only in his field, but on a dog and, apparently, vaporized the animal.[6]

Since, therefore, no remains of the dog were ever recovered and only one known eyewitness to the dog's death is known, this story remains apocryphal at best.[1] However, the story of the Nakhla dog has become something of a legend among astronomers and is even recorded in several editions of The Catalog of Meteorites. At the time, the dog's death publicized in both Arabic and English newspapers as being the first recorded death of an animal, including humans, by a meteorite, though since then both the facts as to whether a dog was actually killed by a meteorite in Nakhla and the notion that this was the first ever recorded animal fatality by meteorite have come into question.

Next time you're virtually roaming Google Earth, make sure you take a close look at any unusual landforms. Geologist Arthur Hickman did just that, and is now the proud parent of the Hickman Crater, a meteorite crater in the Hamersley Ranges.

Dr Hickman, from the Geological Survey of Western Australia, was using Google Earth to look for iron ore when he noticed an unusually circular structure. He sent a Google Earth picture of the structure to his colleague Dr Andrew Glickson at the Australian National University, who later visited the area and confirmed that Dr Hickman had found a particularly well preserved meteorite crater.

"Our best estimate at the moment is that the crater is 10,000 to 100,000 years old," said Dr Hickman.

The crater is 270m across (around the size of the MCG) and is just 35km north of Newman, but hadn't been previously discovered. The area was even mapped by the Geological Survey of WA about 20 years ago, but the crater went unnoticed.