[californiadisasters] Part Of That Recent NorCal Fireball Struck The Bay Area

Tiny meteorite fragment hits Novato home

Henry K. Lee

Updated 8:58 p.m., Sunday, October 21, 2012

A gray, 2-inch rock that hit a Novato home is the first confirmed chunk of the meteor that dramatically exploded over the Bay Area, a scientist said Sunday.

Lisa Webber, 61, found the meteorite in her yard on Saturday, three days after the object fell onto the roof of her home on St. Francis Avenue. She had heard a 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.

Some have marveled at the potential cosmic significance of the fact that it hit a home belonging to a man of the cloth - Webber's husband, Kent Webber, is pastor at Presbyterian Church of Novato. The space rock, in fact, had first hit the roof of his study, she said.

"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?"

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.

"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."

Reporting debris

Peter Jenniskens, a leading meteor hunter at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, asks that anyone who finds what they believe to be meteorite e-mail him - with photos if possible - at petrus.m.jenniskens@nasa.gov.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Tiny-meteorite-fragment-hits-Novato-home-3969584.php

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