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Encounter with orbital debris

An Indian family faces a mystery

NEWARK: A mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of the home of an Indian family here in New Jersey was not a meteorite after all, geologists said.

While the rocklike object looks like a meteorite, scientists say it is a stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely "orbital debris" — or in plain terms, scrap iron.

It is still a mystery where the object came from. "That's the $64,000 question, and there's probably no way to answer it," said Rutgers University geologist Jeremy Delaney. "A piece of scrap iron dropped out of the sky. The question is how did it get into the sky in the first place? That one I simply cannot answer."

Disappointment

Srinivasan Nageswaran, whose family discovered the silvery object after it crashed through the roof and into the upstairs bathroom of his home in Freehold Township, was disappointed by the news. "That's the nature of science," he said on Friday. "If the conclusion from the test says it's not a meteorite, then it's not a meteorite. We have to move forward."

The 46-year-old information technology consultant will now finish repairing his roof. The object, slightly bigger than a golf ball and about as heavy as a can of soup, crashed into his bathroom and dented its tile floor in January. "It's still the world's most popular metallic object that fell from the sky."

Scientists initially determined it was a meteorite. In late April, it was brought to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City so its composition could be examined by its new variable-pressure scanning electron microscope.

The testing took a few hours. The microscope shoots electrons at the surface of the sample, which causes X-rays to be generated, Mr. Delaney said.

"From those X-rays, you can tell the composition and what elements are present in the sample."

This was the first diagnostic testing of the object, which previously been available only for visual examination. Mr. Nageswaran accompanied his object, which weighs 377 gram and is about 7.5 by 5 cm, for the testing.

While extraterrestrial rocks fall to the earth with some regularity, it is rare for them to strike homes. The Nageswarans moved to the U.S. in 1997 .

On the night of January 2, Mr. Nageswaran spotted a hole in the bathroom ceiling and noticed small chunks of drywall and insulation littering the room. His mother heard a loud boom .

Federal aviation officials visited a few hours later and ruled it was not a piece off an airplane. Later, geologists from Rutgers concluded that it was an iron meteorite.

AP

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