posted 06-15-2013 04:19 PM               

Phil Green wasn't quite sure what he had, when he noticed the unusual rock on the banks of the Merrimack River.

His yard backs up to the river and he was on one of his frequent walks, looking for arrowheads. The tide was low, leaving behind exposed mud and smooth granite. And then he noticed something that just didn’t look right.

...Phil's sister in law also thought it was from space so she sent it to a friend who works for NASA. That friend confirmed the rock was special, and that it wasn't actually a rock at all.

What Phil had found was a piece of the Russian Space Station Mir. When Mir was de-commissioned, much of it burned up as it re-entered Earth's orbit. The rest landed in the South Pacific Ocean. Somehow, one palm-sized chunk crashed into the Merrimack River in Amesbury.

posted 06-17-2013 03:18 PM               

...a couple of weeks ago when he received a package in the mail from NASA containing his rock, a plaque and a letter from NASA Analysis Engineer George Leussis confirming that the rock had indeed fallen from space.

...The letter confirmed that while the rock originated on Earth, it had definitely been subjected to a fall from low Earth orbit, which was the reason for the rock's green color and strange properties.

"The material shows a composition similar to that used as ballast by the soviet space program starting in the mid 1980s," Leussis wrote. "This places its most likely origin as Mir, or one of the Progress-M class Russian resupply vehicles, that had undergone a TPS failure."

posted 06-24-2013 08:28 AM               

I stopped by George's office today. He's pretty amused by the whole thing. He confirms that either it's a different George Leussis, or, more likely, it's a total fabrication. Our George is a hardware guy on the Chandra ground operations data team and doesn't have the described expertise, and has never heard of the individual described in the story or (until all his friends started emailing him this weekend) the dubious lump of green stuff. He doesn't know of any other George Leussis associated with NASA.

While it is just barely possible that there is another George Leussis at NASA, and that such a piece of vitreous material might have a composition that could let it be identified as space debris, I think it is more likely that the story is a complete fabrication...

posted 06-24-2013 11:49 AM               

The posting also notes that in Leussis' response to the finder, he stated that there was an 87% likelihood that the composition was consistent with ballast from "MIR, or one of the Progress-M class Russian resupply vehicles, that had undergone a TPS failure."

In other words the analysis was of the composition of the substance and not a judgement of its true origin.