Ok, after watching this video, this has to be the luckiest guy in the world for two reasons.
1. He’s the first person to catch a flamed out meteorite in mid-air barely missing him; and
2. he’s the first person to catch a flamed out meteorite in mid-air barely missing him.
The lucky Norwegian skydiver is Anders Helstrup. He was just out for typical jump in his wing-suit in 2012 when the meteorite went by him. He and many other people have spent the last couple of years of hunting in the woods, marshes and muck to find the meteorite. Alas, it still remains at large.
Geologists believe that the meteorite had been part of a larger meteor that exploded about 20 kilometres above Helstrup during his jump (see number 1 above). They also believe that it is a fairly ordinary Breccia meteorite. However, due to the filming during flight, the meteorite has increased in value greatly. I’m not sure what Mr. Helstrup plans to do with the meteorite if he finds it, but all indications are that he would give it to the Natural History Museum in Oslo.
– Ex astris, scientia –
I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine. As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +
Norman
I thought it was the emerging consensus was that it was no meteorite:
“Let’s get straight to the conclusion. The good news: The crowdsourcing was a success. The bad news: There is no meteorite. It was a rock accidentally packed into the parachute. But how? It was a scenario considered from the beginning and it kept haunting us until the time we went public, as Anders told in the TV interview. …
We think we can reconstruct what happened: A pebble, a few cm in size at most, was accidentally caught inside the parachute at the landing site after the previous jump. Then the parachute was packed on a clean floor and the pebble was not noticed. Then Anders made the jump with the stowaway. This is a wingsuit dive and he’s travelling fast northwards at an downward angle of approximately 40 degrees. When he releases the parachute, the wind catches it and it shoots out to the south of him. The parachute is held back by the cords, but the pebble is not. The pebble is now increasingly getting further south and further above Anders. However, the parachute then slows Anders down, he makes a 250 degree clockwise rotation and at this moment the pebble happens overtake him. It had now been falling for a few seconds and was no longer accelerating much.
The exact details are somewhat unclear, but it doesn’t matter. It has been demonstrated that a pebble brought by the parachute can appear falling rapidly, not accelerating much, above the parachute a few seconds later. It doesn’t matter that a long chain of events that usually don’t happen is required when the alternative hypothesis is a passing meteorite.”
[ http://norskmeteornettverk.no/wordpress/?p=1497 ]
I have no idea why my own sentence became so garbled. Maybe I need to adjust the blood content of my coffee circulation system…