Shallow Impact (the real movie of an asteroid strike)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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(This was originally going to be a reply in the moon crater thread in FQ, but it started to look like a new thread…)

A small meteorite fell in Canada in July of last year. The writeup for it was released yesterday and it is making the news because the impact was caught on video on a Ring camera. The actual impact point is blocked from view, but you see dust, and hear it.

You can see the falling meteorite in two frames of the video. (It has possibly separated into two pieces in the second frame?)

What I found interesting about it is that it shattered into dust and the debris formed rats extremely similar to those seen on much larger impacts.

Charlottetown impact rays:

Charlottetown impact after washing:

Recovered material:

(There are a few curved bits of rusted metal in there (largest on the far left) that must be yard debris that haven’t been separated out.)

Quoting from the Meteorite Bulletin entry:

Mrs. Laura Kelly and her partner found a star-shaped pattern of gray dust on their walkway after coming home from an evening walk, in the community of Marshfield, on the east side of Charlottetown. Not knowing what it was at first, they brushed and rinsed it from the walkway. After reviewing security camera footage (see below), they realized that the material might be meteoritic, and recovered approximately 7 g of fragmented material from the grass adjacent to the walkway. Security camera footage was submitted to the UAb meteorite reporting system, and the owners were then advised by C. Herd that the material was likely meteoritic. The owners then collected another 16 g of material on August 2, 2024, and another 72 g of material on August 8, 2024 from within grass adjacent to the walkway using a vacuum and magnet. Rainfall occurred between the date of the fall and second collection on August 2. The security camera footage includes sound and records the impact of the rock on the walkway at 17:02:20 Atlantic Daylight Time/20:02:20 UTC. A dark rock can be seen in just one frame of the video, indicating rapid movement. The impact of the meteorite formed a divot in the walkway approximately 2 × 2 cm. Type specimen consists of representative material from each of the three dates of collection.

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This is (other than the video capture, and the very nice rays) nothing that unusual for a small meteorite fall. Some of them are solid enough to remain intact even after passing through the roof of a house or the sheet metal of a car, some are fragile enough to turn to powder on a hard surface. But ones this small lose all of their orbital velocity miles above ground and reach the ground with no more terminal velocity than a rock dropped from a tall building or airplane would, which is around a couple of hundred miles per hour. But decades of bad science fiction has shown meteorites of every size reaching the ground at hypersonic speeds (necessary to form the glowing smoke trail) and blasting a large impact crater, and that’s what people expect. Such as this comment on the Youtube link:

And BS accounts people give about how they or someone they knew found a meteorite, like this fairly typical Facebook comment I screencapped a few months ago:

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I thought I had very carefully checked the original post for errors because I knew it would be uneditable with the imbedded video, but I missed one. This meteorite impact formed a number of rays, not “rats” as I stated.

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Since it was in PEI, it was probably actually a high speed potato, a spud-nick, as it were.

(for non Canucks, potatoes are a major industry in Prince Edward Island, the province for which Charlottetown is the capital.

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BTW, the other meteorite story that has been making the news in the past couple of days? Not a meteorite.