The car, which was reportedly in Autopilot<\/a> mode at the time, continued driving blithely as though nothing had happened.<\/p>\n Related: Burning Object Found in Australian Desert Likely Fell From Space<\/a><\/p>\n Melville-Smith reported the incident and its location to the South Australian Museum<\/a>, which is currently investigating to determine the provenance of the projectile.<\/p>\n If the object turns out to be a meteorite, it’s one of the first recorded instances of a meteorite hitting a moving vehicle.<\/p>\n [Update 4 November 2025: An earlier version of this article suggested it may be the very first instance, but reports suggest the St. Louis meteorite<\/a> struck a moving car on 10 December 1950.]<\/p>\n “I thought we’d crashed, it was that loud, it was that violent, it was totally unexpected,” Melville-Smith told the ABC<\/a>. “The car was driving along and unconcerned \u2026 it wasn’t aware of the chaos that was going on in the cabin.”<\/p>\n Material from space constantly rains down on Earth at a rate of about 5,200 tons per year<\/a>. However, most of that mass is in the form of microscopic dust that you’d not even recognize as cosmogenic unless someone told you.<\/p>\n There’s a good chance you have teeny tiny meteorites accumulating in your roof gutters<\/a> even as you read these words.<\/p>\n Larger chunks are rarer; they tend to burn and disintegrate<\/a> in the atmosphere as they fall. It’s vanishingly rare that anyone even sees a meteorite land<\/a>, let alone gets hit by one<\/a>.<\/p>\n The museum’s first course of action is to examine the windscreen itself to see if any particles may have embedded in the glass. If the results are consistent with a space origin, the mineralogists will then go search for the meteorite itself.<\/p>\n “The really unusual thing is that the glass of his windscreen has actually melted a little bit; there was a lot of heat in whatever hit the windscreen,” mineralogist Kieran Meaney of the South Australian Museum told the ABC<\/a>.<\/p>\n Scientists believe that meteorites themselves are actually quite cold when they land on the surface; the heat of atmospheric entry can burn and vaporize away the surface layer of the object without transferring much heat to the interior<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, if an object is moving fast enough, it can generate intense heat on impact as its kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, other explanations may be more likely, including space junk<\/a>, something falling from a passing aircraft, or even just an ordinary Earth rock.<\/p>\n Related: Strange Glass in Australia Reveals a Massive Impact We Never Knew About<\/a><\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762247530_741_0.jpg\")
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