Heaven sent
There was a close call for Roky the dog as space rock crashes through kennel...with him inside. John Vincent reports.
Most of the fiery stuff that plunges our way from the heavens breaks up in the atmosphere and those fragments of cosmic debris that do make it to planet Earth usually end up in the oceans. Even those bits that fall on land are rarely found because they are so small.
But at 9.02pm precisely on April 23, 2019, during a meteorite shower over the rainforest town of Aguas Zarcas in north central Costa Rica, a German shepherd called Roky was dozing in his kennel when a two-pound space rock smashed a seveninch hole in the tin roof and demolished the wooden floor.
The fragment, which broke off on entering the Earth’s atmosphere, narrowly missed a startled Roky – a variant of the English name Rocky, appropriately enough – by inches and he escaped unharmed.
And now his owners have cashed in on the trillion one to heavenly strike by offering the partly restored doghouse for sale. It fetched £32,570 at a Christie’s online Deep
Impact auction, while the actual meteorite that struck Roky’s humble abode, weighing 179 grams or one-third of a pound, sold for £15,850.
Top selling lot in the sale was the fourth largest slice of the Moon ever discovered, which fetched £391,600. The 4.33lb. chunk fell in the Sahara Desert in Mali, 400 kilometres from Timbuktu, in December, 2019. A smaller piece of the Moon, which was blasted off the the lunar surface following an asteroid impact and was found in Morocco in 2007, realised just under £140,000.
Closer to home, a tiny chunk of meteorite which landed in the Gloucestershire market town of Winchcombe on February 28 2021 went for £22,335.
The fragment, found by meteorite
hunter Chris Casey, originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Smallest object in the sale, a 1.7 gram sample of the planet Mars sold for £10,250 – more than 100 times its weight in gold, while a meteorite containing seven billion year old stardust sold for just under £30,000.
A meteorite that battered a mailbox, tearing it off its post, in Claxton, Georgia, was sold at auction in 2007 for $83,000. The most famous object impacted by a meteorite occurred almost immediately after a young woman bought her grandmother’s old Chevy Malibu for about $400. After being struck by the Peekskill meteorite one week later, she sold the car for $69,000. It subsequently changed hands for $230,000 in 2010.
There has never been a documented human death by meteorite. But an animal has been killed by one... a cow in Venezuela in 1972. Asteroids, of course, are much bigger that meteorites, such as the one 63 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.
There has never been a human meteorite death. But a cow was killed by one in Venezuela in 1972.