The Auckland Meteorite
This 1.3 kilogram piece of space rock made headlines around the world in June 2004 when it crashed through the roof of a house in Ellerslie. The 4,600 million year old meteorite is a stony type that resulted from the collision between two asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, a vast ring of space debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The meteorite contains flakes of iron and measures 13 cm in length, but would have been the size of a basketball when it hit the earth’s atmosphere. Distinctive ‘flow lines’ visible on the leading face are caused by the rock surface heating to melting temperature as it hit Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of about 15 km per second. It is only the ninth meteorite ever found in New Zealand and the first to hit a home.