A chunk of meteor that exploded over Bay Area last week found in Novato

A chunk of meteor that exploded over Bay Area, California, was found in the backyard of Lisa Webber home on Sunday, October 21, 2012. Peter Jenniskens, a leading meteor hunter at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, confirmed that the space rock was indeed debris from the meteor that streaked over the sky Wednesday night. It was a gray, 2-inch rock that fell onto the roof of Lisa’s home on St. Francis Avenue, Novato.

Lisa heard the strange sound at the time but didn’t think twice about it until she read a Chronicle story saying debris from the meteor would be found in a band stretching east of San Rafael toward Napa and Sonoma. “It’s just science – and it’s cool,” said Lisa Webber, an administrative nurse at UCSF Medical Center. “It’s wonderful. It’s like the heavens coming down, and history and this thing probably came from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – I mean, how cool is that?”

“The significance of this find is that we can now hope to use our fireball trajectory to trace this type of meteorite back to its origins in the asteroid belt,” Jenniskens wrote on his group’s website. At the time the object hit her roof, Webber thought the sound she heard had come from an animal that was rummaging on her property. She checked the roof, found nothing, and quickly forgot about it until she read The Chronicle on Friday night. That’s when she went searching through the yard and found a rock. She summoned her neighbor’s son, the two put a magnet to the object, and they stuck together. On Saturday, neighbor Luis Rivera climbed onto the roof and found an indentation left by the meteorite. “The surprising thing about it all is that it’s something from the orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and it ended up in Novato,” Rivera said. “And when Lisa was relating all of this to me, it took a while to sink in as to the odds of this happening.”

Initial report on Bay Area fireball: Bright meteor fireball accompanied by loud sonic boom streaked over Bay Area, California

Source: RSOE