Indian scientists say detailed analysis needed.
By Sreekanth A Nair
NASA scientists have ruled out the theory that a man in the state of Tamil Nadu was killed by a piece of meteorite.
If it was indeed the case of a death by a meteorite hit, it would have been the first recorded incident of someone being killed in such a way.
Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer said that death by meteorite hit was so rare and there was no scientifically recorded incident to prove it so far, reported The New York Times.
Referring to a 2013 incident in Russia, Johnson said, “There have been reports of injuries, but even those were extremely rare before the Chelyabinsk event three years ago.”
Several similar incidents have been reported in different parts of the world that caused injury to animals and human beings, but no meteoroid hit has been reportedly killed a man so far.
In 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia, an air blast of an object killed two men and hundreds of reindeer, but no meteoroid was recovered.
After analyzing the photographs of the incident in Tamil Nadu, NASA scientists said that it’s likely a land-based explosion that caused the death.
The report in the Times said, “meteorites are often cool to the touch when they land, and the object recovered from the site in India weighed only a few grams and appeared to be a fragment of a common earth rock.”
But experts of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) are of the view that a detailed analysis is required to arrive at a conclusion.
“The IIA team has received a sample from the local police. The nature of the object can be ascertained only after a detailed analysis by experts,” IIA dean GC Anupama was quoted as saying by Indo-Asian News Service.
The incident happened at Bharathidasan Engineering College in Natrampalli in Vellore district, around 170 km from Chennai, the state capital, where Kamaraj, a bus driver was killed in an explosion caused by an object that fell from the sky. Three others were also injured in the incident that happened on February 6.
The window glasses of a bus and a nearby building were broken and a five feet deep and two feet wide crater was created due to the impact of the explosion.
“Most meteoroids (as the object is known before it impacts the Earth) disintegrate as they traverse through the Earth’s atmosphere, but a few can disrupt giving rise to several meteorites – as the object is known once it impacts the Earth,” Anupama said.
Police said that the fragments of material embedded in Kamaraj’s body had been sent for forensic analysis and the post-mortem report would be finalized only after the receipt of the analysis report.
Accidents caused by meteorites are recorded by International Comet Quarterly.