Meteors are more common than you might think. Here’s what happened with one in Houston

From Houston Public Media:

Picture a space rock. This one was 3 feet wide, but it weighed about a ton and moved at a speed of about 35,000 miles per hour across the sky, just 50 miles above Houston on Saturday.

The meteor’s trajectory, which NASA gives the tongue-in-cheek title of its “Chicken Little trajectory,” flew above the Tomball and Cypress areas, just about 15 miles west of George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Barreling through the Earth’s atmosphere, there’s an immense amount of pressure on the rock. Eventually, as with most such space rocks, called meteors, the pressure was too great, and it caused the meteor to break apart, creating an explosion about 30 miles above North Houston. NASA said the explosion had the energy of about 26 tons of TNT, the equivalent of about 100 lightning strikes happening at once.

“It is ironic that NASA spends millions and billions of dollars to collect rocks from space, and one comes to visit all by itself,” said Carolyn Sumners, vice president for astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Many southeast Texans said they heard the explosion when the meteor broke through the sound barrier on Saturday afternoon. Turning their heads to the sky, a few fragments of space rock called meteorites began falling over the course of 8 minutes, if they didn’t burn up on the way to the ground.

“If a meteorite explodes, it will leave what’s called a ‘strewn field,’” Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said on Texas Standard. “It’s sort of a directional travel — from how it was traveling — it will blow up and leave fragments on the ground.”

Is the sky really falling?

Less than 5 percent of the meteor will typically make it to the ground, NASA says. But the little chunks that do can make a big impact.

For example, one piece of Saturday’s meteor, called a meteorite, broke through a North Houston home’s ceiling, hit the ground and bounced back into the air, striking the ceiling once more, according to Ponderosa Fire Chief Fred Windisch.

“I wasn’t here, but my district chief and I talked and, yeah, the word might be ‘astonished,'” Windisch said Monday. “It was just a very, very unusual response for us.”

Sherrie James, a North Houston resident, said she “had a visitor from out of SPACE” in a GoFundMe post asking for donations to fix damage in her home from a meteorite.

Though the circumstances are rare, most home insurance policies will cover something like meteorite damage, according to the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I), a consumer-focused insurance educational service.

“Standard homeowners policies include protection for ‘falling objects,’ which applies to rare events like meteorites, asteroids, or even space debris,” a spokesperson for Triple-I said. “That means if a meteorite strikes a home and causes damage, the structure itself, and typically the homeowner’s belongings inside, would be covered, subject to the policy’s deductible and limits.”

Meteorite fragments, though, could be worth searching for. Sumners said some of them are rare enough to fetch a price of $100 per gram. Experts recommend bringing meteorite fragments to research institutes at universities or museums, like at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which has several of its own meteorites.

Not as uncommon as you might expect

Less than a week prior to Saturday’s meteor explosion in Houston, something similar happened above Cleveland, Ohio — albeit with an even larger meteor.

A 6-foot, 7-ton space rock broke apart on the morning of March 17, causing a similar sonic boom and similar meteorite fragments to hit the Earth. The two phenomena occurring just days apart from one another had many watching the sky, asking how to be prepared.

“In general, the Earth’s atmosphere is struck by objects from space with regularity,” Gulick said. “It just has to be a large enough object that it gets close enough to the ground before burning up that it can make an explosion and actually make pieces arrive on the ground. Most of the time, what you see are basically shooting stars: they’re high up enough, they just burn up, and that’s it.”

Anywhere between once a year and once a decade, an asteroid the size of a car reaches the Earth’s atmosphere. Most often, it burns up and creates a massive fireball before it can reach the surface of the Earth.

Between the Ohio meteor and the one in Houston, Sumners said it’s possible the two rocks could be related to each other, given how rare such an occurrence would be otherwise.

Meteors can do much more damage, of course, though it is significantly rarer. According to NASA, every 2,000 years or so, a football field-sized meteor hits the Earth, doing damage to the area; every few million years, an even larger meteor hits the Earth and could threaten civilization.

Instances of injury from meteorites are extremely rare. The first documented case, according to NASA, was in 1954, when a meteorite crashed through an Alaska woman’s home. In 2013, a meteor exploded above Russia, causing a massive shock wave over 200 square miles. More than 1,600 people were injured as a result but mostly due to broken glass, according to NASA.

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and houstonpublicmedia.org. Thanks for donating today.