[meteorite-list] Meteorite-damaged New Zealand Sofa For Sale

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:16:20 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <200701150316.TAA11357_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=176828

Meteorite-damaged NZ sofa for sale
ninemsn.com (Australia)
January 14, 2007

A New Zealand couple are auctioning a sofa which was damaged when a
meteorite crashed through the roof of their Auckland home.

Phil and Brenda Archer, who now live in New Plymouth, are advertising
the sofa - and a replica meteorite - for sale on the TradeMe website.

The couple were propelled into the headlines when the meteorite smashed
through the roof of their Auckland home in June 2004.

The rock travelled up to 700 million kilometres from the asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter.

The meteorite was a four billion-year-old 1.3 kg rock and was the last
known recovered meteorite to have landed in New Zealand.

Named the Auckland meteorite, the space rock was bought for $NZ40,000
($A35,500) by the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Along with the sofa the couple have also put on the website ruptured
roofing tiles, a splintered ceiling beam, a ceiling panel and a pink
batt all damaged by the meteorite.

At 7.30am Sunday the reserve price of $400 for the sofa had not been met.

The couple told the Taranaki Daily News they wanted to sell the
collection because they were sick of lugging the items around.

"Since it happened, we have moved six times. We want to get rid of them
and let someone else have them that might see some value in them," Phil
Archer told the newspaper.

Archer was sitting on the toilet checking out new cars in a motoring
magazine when the meteorite hit his house.

"There was this huge bang and a cloud of dust and debris went through
the front room. I thought a car had hit the house."

In the only account in New Zealand of a meteorite crashing into a house,
the chunk of space rock punched a hole through the roof of the Archers'
home, bounced off their couch, ricocheted off the ceiling and back on to
the couch before ending up on the floor.

The most common meteorites to fall on Earth are called chondrites -
stone meteorites which contain small balls of fine-grained silicate rock
matrix with small spherical glass inclusions.

Meteor showers recur on nearly the same date of every year, because they
occur when the Earth's orbit around the Sun takes it through a clump of
meteoric debris.
Received on Sun 14 Jan 2007 10:16:20 PM PST