Article in The New Orleans Times Picayune :o
http://nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/inde ... 133640.xml
HEAVENLY HOME WRECKER
Uptown resident finds his roof, floors ripped through by fallen rock; Tulane scientists say tests indicate rare, otherworldy object: a meteorite
Saturday September 27, 2003
By Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer
When Roy Fausset walked into his Joseph Street home after work Tuesday evening, he knew immediately that something was very, very wrong.
"The powder room door was open and it looked like an artillery shell had hit the room," he said.
Something had fallen with enough force to punch a hole through the roof and two floors before coming to rest in the crawl space beneath the house.
It was a sandy-colored rock that appeared to have been burned around its edges. Preliminary tests by scientists at Tulane University indicate this particular rock came from outer space.
If so, that makes it an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Meteorites enter the Earth's gravitational field with some frequency; all but a tiny percent of them burn up during their passage through the atmosphere -- what are commonly called "shooting stars." So far as could be determined, the Joseph Street landing was a first for the city.
"We found olivine, pyroxene, plagioclase and troilite," a combination of minerals often found in meteorites, said Stephen Nelson, chairman of Tulane's earth and environmental sciences department.
Nelson used X-ray diffraction Friday afternoon to double-check the type of individual minerals that make up the rock. He had first identified the rock as rhyolite, a form of volcanic rock found in Mexico and south Texas.
The minerals Nelson found don't automatically mean it's a meteorite, he said, because they're also found in the Earth's mantle, deep underneath the planet's crust.
"But we don't commonly see pieces of mantle falling out of the sky," he said. "And the black crust, which I thought was a weathering line at first, perhaps it's a fusion crust -- material that melted as it passed through the atmosphere."
Nelson said the rock is known as a "stony meteorite," a type more common than the black, ironlike rocks that have become the archetypal meteorites in the public imagination.
Fausset said neighbors told him they heard what sounded like a car crash just after 4 p.m., but they didn't know it was his home being hit.
"One of my neighbors on South Tonti Street had two children in her back yard, eating Popsicles, and they heard a terrific noise," he said. "And a lady next door to her heard it. She was indoors and ran out into her back yard, but didn't see anything."
"But if it had hit 100 feet away in that back yard, it could have killed one or all of those people," Fausset said.
Finding the damage inside his home came as a shock, he said: "We had just renovated the powder room and now there was plaster everywhere. I looked up at the ceiling and saw this big hole."
A quick check in the adjoining utility room revealed another hole in the ceiling and what looked like a broken ceiling joist.
"I went outside and looked up and about midway down the front of the roof, there was a hole about the size of a basketball," he said.
Fausset immediately called his insurance agent, who suggested he check upstairs to look for any more damage.
In his daughter's second-floor room, Fausset discovered that something had smashed through the ceiling there, too, and it had demolished an antique wicker desk before cutting a neat hole in the wall-to-wall carpet and the flooring beneath it.
Back in the first-floor bathroom, Fausset found another hole leading through the floor to the crawl space.
"That's when I called the police," he said. When officers arrived, they found several chunks of rock beneath the hole in the bottom floor that matched fragments found in Fausset's daughter's room.
"I'm in shock," Fausset said Friday after learning the rock had been identified as a meteorite. "Oh, that's scary. I will certainly go to church this Sunday, because the Lord was certainly sending me a message."
And the meteorite?
"I guess I'll go put it in my safe-deposit box, or just frame it," he said.
. . . . . . .
Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3327.
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