'Meteorite' narrowly misses skydiver

[Bobito_Pepperoni]

http://www.skynews.com.au/offbeat/article.aspx?id=965575

 

A skydiver has narrowly avoided serious injury after what has been described as a meteorite hurtled past him.

Anders Helstrup jumped from a small plane along with other members of Oslo Parachute Club in Norway, but moments after his parachute opened, he could feel that something was not quite right.

It was only when he watched back the footage from his helmet camera that he spotted what looked like a stone passing close by.

He told Norwegian news website nrk.no: 'When we stopped the film, we could clearly see something that looked like a stone.

'At first it crossed my mind that it had been packed into a parachute, but it's simply too big for that.'

He contacted the Natural History Museum in Oslo to try and find out what it was.

'The film caused a sensation in the meteorite community,' he said.

'They seemed convinced that this was a meteorite, perhaps I was the one who was the most sceptical.'

Geologist Hans Amundsen told nrk.no: 'It can't be anything else.

'The shape is typical of meteorites - a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded.'

He added the footage from the skydive in 2012, which has only just been reported in Norway, captures for the very first time a meteor in 'dark flight', the portion of its fall to Earth when it does not emit light.

Asked for his opinion on the probability of capturing such an event, Mr Amundsen told nrk.no: 'It's certainly much less likely than winning the lottery three times in a row.'

The search is now on to find what fell from the sky on that day in the county of Hedmark.

A website has even been set up to try and find the falling object.

Edited April 13, 2014 by Bobito_Pepperoni