posted 02-08-2016 08:55 AM               

If a meteorite indeed caused the death, bus driver Kamaraj will be the first person ever to have died in a meteorite strike. Saturday's blast also injured two gardeners and a student...

Witnesses said the blast left a crater 5ft deep and 2ft wide. Policemen recovered a black, pockmarked stone weighing 11g from the blast site.

A police officer said the department would consult experts from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru and ask them for a detailed analysis of the stone to ascertain whether it is debris from a meteorite. A team of experts from the institute will visit the site on February 8.

posted 02-10-2016 08:40 AM               

...NASA scientists in the United States were more emphatic, saying in a public statement that the photographs posted online were more consistent with "a land based explosion" than with something from space.

Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer, said in an email that a death by meteorite impact was so rare that one has never been scientifically confirmed in recorded history. "There have been reports of injuries, but even those were extremely rare before the Chelyabinsk event three years ago," he said, referring to a 2013 episode in Russia.

In addition, meteorites are often cool to the touch when they land, and the object recovered from the site in India weighed only a few grams and appeared to be a fragment of a common earth rock.