A skydiver may have captured the first film ever of a meteorite plunging down at terminal velocity, also known as its “dark flight” stage.
The footage was captured in 2012 by a helmet cam worn by Anders Helstrup as he and other members of the Oslo Parachute Club jumped from a small plane that took off from an airport in Hedmark, Norway. He emerged from the encounter unscathed and actually, didn’t even see it when it happened. He tells NRK, the Norwegian government-owned media: “I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn’t register what was happening.”
When he brought the video to the Natural History Museum in Oslo, experts seemed convinced the footage was of a meteorite. “It can’t be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites -- a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded,” geologist Hans Amundsen says.
The footage was captured in 2012 by a helmet cam worn by Anders Helstrup as he and other members of the Oslo Parachute Club jumped from a small plane that took off from an airport in Hedmark, Norway. He emerged from the encounter unscathed and actually, didn’t even see it when it happened. He tells NRK, the Norwegian government-owned media: “I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn’t register what was happening.”
When he brought the video to the Natural History Museum in Oslo, experts seemed convinced the footage was of a meteorite. “It can’t be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites -- a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded,” geologist Hans Amundsen says.
