[meteorite-list] Stoned sofa for sale

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 23:44:57 -0500
Message-ID: <13djq2tnirlcck0uqoaoeeufpsccfu2vco_at_4ax.com>

Come on, if people buy mailboxes hit by meteorites, cars hit by meteorites, vent
covers hit by meteorites, and hammer heads dug up while looking for meteorites,
surely someone here would want this.


http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=347641

Meteorite-damaged NZ sofa for sale
14th January 2007, 5:30 WST

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.

NZPA
Received on Sat 13 Jan 2007 11:44:57 PM PST