Tiny meteorite fragment hits Novato home

Tiny meteorite fragment hits Novato home

Henry K. Lee

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

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  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 last week. Lisa Webber found the meteorite in her yard on Saturday, three days after the object fell onto the roof of her home on Saint Francis Avenue.
  Photo: Courtesy Of Leigh Blair / SF

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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.

Henry K. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee

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Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Tiny-meteorite-fragment-hits-Novato-home-3969584.php#ixzz2A04jh2tL

Novato is north of San Francisco and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and South of Petaluma. It's pretty amazing to think that Maldek that once was a planet before it was an asteroid belt might have been the home of some of our ancestors. And now, another piece of our old planet has hit earth just like many have before. Likely the largest piece to hit earth from the asteroid belt was the one that made the Gulf of Mexico and that killed all the largest dinosaurs. This likely also eventually made it possible for humanoids to live here without getting eaten. Fancy that!

Note: when the Soviets sent up a probe to the Asteroid belt in the 1970s they found that it had been a planet destroyed by a thermonuclear war. I'm thinking that it might have been a war between the inhabitants of Mars and Maldek? the Asteroid belt planet. In a way they both lost because the survivors of both planets likely had to settle here on earth and interbred with apes to survive the environment here. Likely, all the purebreeds from Mars and Maldek either died or had to leave Earth eventually because of a relatively hostile or non-adaptive environment for beings from a completely different eco-system. (Actually beings from two completely different eco-systems which then came to earth, a third completely different ecosystem.

Note: If you were wondering why you hadn't heard this before it was suppressed outside of Russia and China by different Churches from the western news media. However, if you remember the Soviet Union and China were atheistic at the time and wouldn't have had a problem with proven scientific facts that upset the major churches of the world at that time.