[FPSPACE] Record meteorite hit Norway

[LARRY KLAES]

>Record meteorite hit Norway

>As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact 
>comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima
>
>Afterposten, 9 June 2006

>http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece
>
>At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms 
>and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking 
>several seconds to travel across the sky.
>
>A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology 
>research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic 
>disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.
>
>Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera 
>because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.
>"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with 
>a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object 
>and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.
>
>"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a 
>solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.
>
>Astronomers were excited by the news.
>
>"There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the 
>house," Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told 
>Aftenposten.no.
>
>Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred 
>kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The 
>meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.
>
>"This is simply exceptional. I cannot imagine that we have had such a 
>powerful meteorite impact in Norway in modern times. If the meteorite was 
>as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. 
>Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may 
>be able to compare it to the (atomic) bomb," Røed Ødegaard said.
>
>The astronomer believes the meteorite was a giant rock and probably the 
>largest known to have struck Norway.
>
>"The record was the Alta meteorite that landed in 1904. That one was 90 
>kilos (198 lbs) but we think the meteorite that landed Wednesday was 
>considerably larger," Røed Ødegaard said, and urged members of the public 
>who saw the object or may have found remnants to contact the Institute of 
>Astrophysics
>