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Tech

Here Is a Baseball-Sized Meteorite Ripping By a Skydiver

Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

Anders Helstrup, a member of the Oslo Parachute Club, felt something was up as he free fell in summer 2012. Thousands of feet above the surface of the Earth, he could've sworn he sensed something buzz past him.

“I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn’t register what was happening,” Helstrup told NRK.no.

Upon landing, he immediately rolled playback on his pair of helmet cameras. What he saw stunned him: A small, baseball-sized object, whipping past at terminal velocity. Could it be?

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“It can’t be anything else," geologist Hans Amundsen told NRK after reviewing Helstrup's footage. "The shape is typical of meteorites – a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded.”

The kicker is that the rock, which Amundsen speculates likely broke off of a larger space stone high above Amundsen, is not lit up. This is what's known as "dark flight"; after it's entered the Earth's atmosphere it begins slowing down, ionizing the air molecules around it, at which point it ceases plummeting at an angle. It drops straight down, spent.

So here, for the first time in history, is a meteorite caught on tape post-burn.

Talk about being in the right place at the right time. The money shot comes at around the 3:25 mark. If you're impatient, here's the condensed version: