What was the Peekskill meteorite?
Peekskill is a stony meteorite of about 12.6 kg that fell on 9 October 1992 after a fireball filmed by many people across the eastern United States, and it struck the boot of a parked car in Peekskill, New York.
On the evening of Friday 9 October 1992, a brilliant fireball streaked north-eastwards across the eastern United States. It was seen across several states, and it lasted long enough, around 40 seconds, for people to grab their video cameras. Because it happened during Friday-night American football games, many parents were already filming. At least 16 videos captured it, making it by far the best-filmed meteorite fall of its time.
Those recordings were scientifically priceless. By comparing the films and the positions of the camera operators, researchers reconstructed the fireball's path through the atmosphere in detail, watching it break into dozens of fragments, and calculated the orbit that the meteoroid had followed around the Sun before its encounter with Earth.
The end of the story was more personal. In Peekskill, a town in New York state north of New York City, teenager Michelle Knapp heard a loud crash outside her home. She found that a stone had smashed through the boot of her red 1980 Chevrolet Malibu and was lying in a shallow dent in the driveway underneath. It weighed about 12.6 kg.
The meteorite is an H6 ordinary chondrite, a stony meteorite with a moderate amount of metal, from an asteroid that was strongly heated early in its history. The car became famous in its own right: it was bought by collectors and has since been displayed in museums and exhibitions around the world, alongside pieces of the meteorite. Peekskill showed how valuable ordinary people's observations can be, a role now taken by dashcams, doorbell cameras and dedicated fireball camera networks.