Meteorite narrowly misses Norwegian skydiver

A Norwegian man narrowly avoided being hit by a meteorite while skydiving and has captured the first ever video footage of a meteorite travelling through the air after its flame has gone out.

Anders Helstrup, who belongs to the Oslo Parachute Club said "I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn't register what was happening,"

"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."

A geologist confirmed that a meteorid had exploded about 20 kilometres above Mr Helstrup and his fellow skydivers when they made the historic jump in 2012. Ever since then, teams of experts and enthusiasts have been scouring the Norwegian countryside in search of the rock specimen that fell.

A meteoroid slows down when it enters the earth's atmosphere, painting a blazing trail of flames across the sky behind it as it turns into a meteorite.

When the flames go out, the meteorite enters a stage known as dark flight, where it falls straight to earth as a rock.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10742854/Meteorite-narrowly-misses-Norwegian-skydiver.html