Peekskill

The 1992 fireball filmed by football fans across the eastern United States that ended up in the boot of a parked car.

Key facts

Type

Ordinary chondrite (H6)

Fell or found

Fell (witnessed and filmed)

Year

1992 (9 October)

Country

United States (New York)

Mass

12.4 kg

Official name

Peekskill

On the evening of Friday 9 October 1992, a brilliant greenish fireball crossed the sky over the eastern United States. It travelled for around 40 seconds and more than 700 kilometres, from West Virginia across Pennsylvania and Maryland towards New York, breaking into glowing fragments as it went. It was a Friday night, and in many towns crowds had gathered for high school American football games. Parents with video cameras, filming their children, swung round to record the spectacle.

The car in the driveway

In the town of Peekskill, New York, 18-year-old Michelle Knapp was at home when she heard a loud crash outside. Running out, she found that the boot of her 1980 Chevrolet Malibu had been smashed through. Beneath the car, in a small dent in the driveway, lay a rugby-ball-sized stone. It weighed 12.4 kilograms and was still warm. It soon became clear that the culprit had come from space.

The meteorite and the car were later sold to collectors, and the dented Malibu has since travelled to museums and exhibitions around the world, becoming one of the most famous cars in science.

Fireball on film

Before Peekskill, only a handful of meteorite falls had been photographed well enough to work out where the object had come from. In 1992 there were no smartphones, yet the fireball was captured on at least 16 separate videos from different places. By combining these recordings, scientists could reconstruct its path through the atmosphere in three dimensions, measuring its speed and how it broke up.

From that track they calculated its orbit around the Sun. The meteoroid had come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, on a path that crossed Earth's orbit. Peekskill became one of the first meteorites with both a known orbit and a recovered sample, an important pairing that links meteorites to the parts of the Solar System they come from.

What it is

The Peekskill stone is an H6 ordinary chondrite. Ordinary chondrites are the most common type of meteorite to fall. 'H' stands for high iron: H chondrites contain the most metal of the three ordinary chondrite groups, and a magnet will be attracted to them. '6' means the rock was strongly heated inside its parent asteroid, so its chondrules, the tiny round grains typical of chondrites, are blurred and hard to see. Its interior is a breccia, a rock made of broken fragments cemented together, evidence of collisions on its parent asteroid.

The meteoroid that entered the atmosphere was far larger, but most of it broke up and burned away or fell unseen. Only a single stone was recovered.

How rare is a fireball like this?

Most meteors, the familiar 'shooting stars', are made by grains of dust no bigger than sand burning up high in the atmosphere. A fireball bright enough to light up the ground and drop meteorites needs a much larger object, and such events over any particular region are rare. Seeing one, let alone filming it, is a matter of luck.

Why it matters

Peekskill showed the power of ordinary people's recordings. Today, fireball networks of automated cameras, as well as dashboard and doorbell cameras, routinely help scientists calculate orbits and track down fresh meteorites. Peekskill was a pioneer of that approach. It is also a reminder that meteorites can land anywhere, although the chance of one hitting a particular car, or person, is extraordinarily small.

If you ever see a bright fireball, note the time, the direction it travelled and where it disappeared, and report it to a fireball network or local astronomy society. Your observation could help find the next meteorite.

Did you know?

See more

Peekskill in the catalogue