Canadian Ring Camera Captured The First Audio And Visual Recording Of A Meteorite Hitting Earth
A man from Prince Edward Island returned home from walking his dogs to find a pile of dust-like debris on the walkway to his front door, which ended up being caused by a meteorite — and his Ring camera captured it hitting earth in a historic first. Joe Velaidum, a resident of Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, a small Canadian island northeast of Maine, checked his Ring camera footage to see where the debris came from upon returning from his walk. A friend suggested that the mysterious flying object could be a meteorite , so Velaidum collected samples and sent them into the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection curator Chris Herd.
Herd discovered that the sample was chondrite, the most common type of space rock that strikes Earth, and that it likely originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The footage is believed to be the first time that both sound and visuals of a meteorite strike have ever been recorded. Herd told CBC News
The meteorite has been named the Charlottetown Meteorite after Prince Edward Island’s capital city, and it landed on the brick-lined front entrance to Velaidum’s house. He’d walked directly over the spot that the meteorite struck just seconds before when he left to take his dogs for a walk. Had he lingered there a few seconds longer, the meteorite could very well have struck him or one of his dogs. Velaidum said he was shocked to consider that he was standing right where the meteorite fell from hundreds of millions of miles away, noting it probably would have ripped him in half. The University of Alberta said,
