\u201cMy wife said, \u2018The car\u2019s blown up\u2019\u201d, Melville-Smith told IFLScience. \u201cI thought someone had fired a shotgun at us.\u201d Once they had a chance to assess, both were ruled out. Aside from a destroyed windscreen, the car was perfectly functional, and indeed, kept driving. Not only was there no sign of a bullet, but the chance of anyone being in such a remote location to fire one was minimal.<\/p>\n
Kangaroos<\/a> are a common road hazard in such areas, but no animal would produce a crater where the windscreen melted and sagged inwards. Although it had solidified again by the time anyone looked closely, the glass was still warm to the touch. The travelers backtracked to see if they could spot anything unusual about the location where they were hit, but found nothing. The car\u2019s cameras provided nothing helpful.<\/p>\n When Melville-Smith took his car in for repairs, the mystery deepened. Melville-Smith is an enthusiastic promoter of electric cars<\/a>, having installed the first high-speed charger in the state outside Adelaide at one of his clinics. Local repair shops told him the cameras for his Tesla\u2019s self-driving mode were beyond their capacity to fix, and the car would need to go to Adelaide, but all of them noted they\u2019d never seen a partially melted windscreen before. One told Melville-Smith that automotive glass melts at 1,500 \u00b0C (2,700 \u00b0F), and he had no idea what could cause it.<\/p>\n The cratering of the windscreen doesn’t look like what repairers are familiar with.<\/p>\n Image courtesy of Dr Andrew Melville-Smith<\/p>\n Melville-Smith sent photographs to the South Australian Museum, which initially suspected anything but a space rock. \u201cWe get a lot of meteorite inquiries at the Museum and most of the time they turn out to be a rock from [Earth] that is doing a very good impersonation of a meteorite,\u201d said Minerals and Meteorites Collection Manager Dr Kieran Meaney in a statement<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nevertheless, as a scientist, Meaney gave the claim a chance. \u201cIt was certainly hit by something and it was something hot, and we don’t have another good explanation for what else it could have been,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n At this point, Melville-Smith told IFLScience, \u201cThe museum got very excited.\u201d The possibility that the car had been hit by a meteorite had occurred to Melville-Smith before, he said, but it was only after the museum\u2019s endorsement that \u201cwe felt confident enough to say it publicly. Before that we felt a bit silly.\u201d<\/p>\n The museum will take samples tomorrow, but told ABC News<\/a> that if this was a meteorite, it would be a first. Certainly, none of the publicity the event has attracted has brought forward anyone who knows of another example.<\/p>\n Dr Melville-Smith told IFLScience that if the windscreen can be removed in one piece, he will donate it to the museum \u2013 it’s not like he can use it again.<\/p>\n Image courtesy of Dr Andrew Melville-Smith<\/p>\n Some experts are skeptical of the meteorite idea, however. Professor Jonti Horner, an astrophysicist at the University of Southern Queensland, told ABC News that while meteorites get very hot as they speed through the upper atmosphere, they both slow and cool down, so shouldn\u2019t be at glass-melting temperatures on landing.<\/p>\n Moreover, Dr Hadrien Devillepoix<\/a> of Curtin University told IFLScience that under clear skies, people would have been able to see the event from as far away as Adelaide if looking in the right direction. Consequently, despite the uninhabited location where the car was struck, some report would be expected. Nothing has been heard. No one in the car saw a bright light prior to the impact.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it is hard to think of an Earthly explanation for the damage, particularly with the clear skies ruling out lightning.<\/p>\n Melville-Smith told IFLScience he is not fixed on the meteorite hypothesis, and claims no expertise on the matter. \u201cI know cats and dogs, not space rocks,\u201d he said. Having been overwhelmed with work that has prevented much investigation, thanks to a local outbreak of parvovirus<\/a>, he took the opportunity to promote what he knows. \u201cVaccinate your dogs<\/a>,\u201d he told IFLScience. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen a single vaccinated dog [with the virus].\u201d Meanwhile, many unvaccinated dogs have died.<\/p>\n Dr Ellie Sansom<\/a> of the Desert Fireball Network<\/a> told IFLScience: \u201cI have serious doubts in its space-rock origin. Not ruling out space debris though.\u201d It\u2019s been a fortnight since some space junk landed on the other side of Australia while still on fire<\/a>, so while space debris is also seldom this hot, it\u2019s more plausible. Space junk landing is becoming more common<\/a>, but it\u2019s still probably rarer than meteorites. Nevertheless, if all other options are ruled out, the extraordinary odds against such an event may be all that is left.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Melville-Smith thinks the fact that the car was a Tesla in self-driving mode saved him and the passengers from something much worse. \u201cIf we were in any other vehicle, we would have crashed during those moments of incapacitation,\u201d he said on his clinic’s website. \u201cThe [Full Self-Driving] system kept us safe.\u201d<\/p>\n If the impactor was indeed space junk, identifying a source will be quite a challenge. So, we may never confirm the almost unimaginable irony of whether what the Tesla\u2019s distinctive capacities saved those aboard from was a piece of Elon Musk\u2019s other company falling from the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On October 19, South Australian vet Dr Andrew Melville-Smith\u2019s newly collected car was struck by something, leaving damage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-235192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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