--- title: Meteoroite Strike Kills Man in India, but You're Not Next description: There are far likelier ways to go than getting clobbered by a space rock canonical: https://time.com/4212260/meteor-death-india/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-02-08T19:30:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:41:48.817Z article:section: Science og:title: A Meteor Killed a Guy, but Here's Why You're Not Next og:description: There are far likelier ways to go than getting clobbered by a space rock og:url: https://time.com/4212260/meteor-death-india/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte06be86207f12812/69887ca6bc6cfcc1ea3dba3c/meteor-death-man-hit-risk.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1806 og:image:height: 1016 og:image:alt: Meteor strikes Russia og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Meteor Killed a Guy, but Here's Why You're Not Next twitter:description: There are far likelier ways to go than getting clobbered by a space rock twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte06be86207f12812/69887ca6bc6cfcc1ea3dba3c/meteor-death-man-hit-risk.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # A Meteor Killed a Guy, but Here's Why You're Not Next > Sponsored content. 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Astronauts Scott Kelly and Terry Virts speak live from the space station_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 8, 2016 7:30 PM UTC  A hole on the ice of Chebarkul Lake in the Russian region of Chelyabinsk, believed to have been made by a meteor fragment, is shown on Feb. 16, 2013. A hole on the ice of Chebarkul Lake in the Russian region of Chelyabinsk, believed to have been made by a meteor fragment, is shown on Feb. 16, 2013. Kyodo/AP  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 8, 2016 7:30 PM UTC New Concord, Ohio was not the place to be standing outside on May 1, 1860—at least if you were a horse. It was in that town on that day that a meteorite fell out of the sky, killing the unsuspecting critter, who was decidedly in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Thirteen years earlier, on July 14, 1847, a 37 lb. (17 kg) iron meteorite smashed through the roof of a home in Hauptmannsdorf, Bohemia, showering three children with ceiling debris. Then there was the car that got clobbered in Benld, Illinois on Sept. 29, 1938, when a 4-lb. (1.8 kg) meteorite dropped out of the sky. More than 200 years of such cosmic hijinks have been collected and catalogued on the website of Harvard University’s [International Comet Quarterly](http://www.icq.eps.harvard.edu/meteorites.html) (yes, that’s a thing), and now the rock counters have a new and more troubling entry to add to their list. According to [multiple news accounts](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/indian-man-could-be-first-recorded-human-fatality-due-to-a-meteorite/) in India, a bus driver at the Bharathidasan Engineering College was killed by an explosion near an outdoor water tank that authorities are attributing to a meteorite strike. Initially, the police suspected a bomb, but an investigation at the site found no traces of explosives.  Most reports are characterizing the incident as the first confirmed death by meteorite, though numerous fatalities are included in the Comet Quarterly’s list, as well as one story of one woman who lost an arm to a meteorite. But the majority of those accounts are too old to be considered reliable, not least because the science of tracking incoming ordnance and analyzing the debris didn’t exist back then—at least not in a terribly sophisticated way. So what are the odds that there will one day be a space rock out there that has your name on it? You can start your number-crunching with at least the possibility that the Indian victim really was the first, in which case the risk is exactly one in every single human being who has ever lived since the dawn of time—so you can probably feel safe taking out a 30-year mortgage. But a meteorite doesn’t have to score a direct hit to do real damage. Every day, at least [100 tons debris](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/01mar%5Fmeteornetwork/), most of it dust, enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The overwhelming share of it burns up long before it could reach the ground. But an overwhelming share is not everything, and the debris that gets through can cause serious damage. On Feb. 15, 2013, a 65-ft. (20 m) meteor [exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia](http://science.time.com/2013/06/26/meteor-strike-investigating-a-cosmic-crime-scene/) releasing a 500-kiloton blast that shattered windows in 3,600 buildings and sent more than 1,200 people to the hospital. On June 30, 1908 a larger meteor [devastated the forest near Russia’s Tunguska River](http://science.time.com/2013/02/14/asteroid-hits-earth-how-the-doomsday-scenario-would-play-out/), leveling 80 million trees over an area of 830 sq. mi. (2,150 sq. km) in a blast that has been estimated as the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. It’s the energy in such a heavy, high-speed projectile that gives it its explosive power—a force far exceeding what the damage would be if the same mass were simply dropped from say, a 100 story building. The real if remote risk of meteor disasters led to the formation of [NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Office](http://time.com/74293/asteroid-meteor-b612-foundation/), a research team that coordinates with both professional and amateur astronomers all over the world to keep track of potentially dangerous space junk and plot its trajectory. The office estimates that it’s got a bead on about 95% of the 1 km (.62 mi.) rocks in the vicinity of Earth that could do the kind of global damage that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s not remotely everything, and as Chelyabinsk and Tunguska showed, meteor damage can be catastrophic even if it’s not global. Still, most people—like it or not—worry less about what might happen to someone else somewhere else, than they do about a meteorite arriving at the more intimate address we all call My House. And the odds of that are very, very slim. Space is a very big place. The Earth, in relative terms, is an exceedingly small thing. And your house—or your head—are much smaller still. Put meteor strike on the list that includes lightning strike, tarantula bite, and sharknado storm. Could they happen? Maybe. Will they? No. Watch your cholesterol, cross with the light and don’t text while driving, and you’ll probably be fine. ## Transcript Station, this is Time Magazine how do you hear me ? >> We read you loud and clear . >> Guys its see you, can you tell me a little about where you are in the station right now and what your day has been like so far? Good morning, Jeff. We are in the airlock right now. This is where we get ready for and do our space walks. These are our space suits right here, so, right now Scott and I are not planned to do one. I did one on the last part of my mission with Butch Wilmore, and Scott's gonna do several here in a few months. But we get the equipment and the space suits ready here, and that part of the airlock right there, we close the hatch. Depress all the air out of it and go out in space from there. And where are we your in the cycle of your work day right now? Hey, good morning Jeff, good to talk to you. It is 10: 46 in the morning and we are on GMT so we get up around 6 a. m. Out work day starts generally about sometime between 7 and 7: 30. All of us are kind of on, do different activities, sometimes together but a lot of time separately. So far today for me personally I had some exercise. My first of two exercise sessions, running on the treadmill for. About 30 minutes, and then I did some some research. This experiment called fine motor skills is a cognitive experiment to investigate how our cognitive abilities change over the long term. And a few other little odds and ends activities that probably aren't worth going into, but that are very important. For you know, maintaining the space station and, and maintaining our, our lives up here . >> Now you were expecting the docking of the Russian Progress ship, just a couple, a week or so ago, how big a problem, if at all, is it that the ship didn't arrive and is there anything aboard that you guys were especially looking forward to? Any personal items? Well, actually this is a testament to how well stocked this space station is. We did lose the resupply ship but we have enough supplies on board to stay here for many months. Food and water and clothes and that kind of stuff. We're still able to do all our scientific experiments so. It was a loss and of course it it's gonna effect the future but we were able to cope with it, and like I said, there's plenty of margin on board. So there's no immediate danger. That was a Russian ship, so our [ UNKNOWN ] friends, we have a crew of six three of them are Russian [ UNKNOWN ]. So most of the equipment was for them. Most of the food was for them. So we've been sharing as much as we can And, we've had failures in the past of American vehicles, and, of course, they share with us. It's a pretty cool partnership to be able to work together like that. Scott, you're only two months in, less than two months in out of your, your year in space, but can you tell us anything about, any of the biomedical experiments you've done and any of them that, that involve Mark? So you know, there's a lot of research that is involved in my stay up here. You know, like I was sent to the weather channel. I don't know if you were listening, over 400 different experiments throughout the, the period of time you're in various disciplines. For me personally, there's the one year research which has a lot of imaging associated with it. Ultrasound of various parts of my body, my heart, arteries and my neck and brain and muscles. And some of that involves the science that is being done with my brother and I that comparative Science which is most cases genetic based. So it's samples, blood, urine, other samples that our bodies give off. And I've done those collections twice and done a bunch of the ultrasound tests Also a lot of tests on my eyes and my vision but the stuff that involves my brother is some of the ultrasound work and a lot of the human samples. And those don't always sound like fun, so what do you guys do for fun? What's the most enjoyable recreational part of your day? Well you know unfortunately there's not a whole lot of time for fun. We have a pretty good work schedule. I don't think people realize, you know, how hard we work up here. And we basically work, at least I do, from the time I get up Until about an hour or so before I go to sleep. And, you know, these other two guys work harder than I do. So, yeah, not a lot of, free time for fun, but we, you know, we have a chance to, you know, watch some movies to. You certainly enjoy the view. To read, although I haven't read anything yet book wise. I need to start that, And you know, a lot of the time is, is spent communicating with folks on Earth. And Terry, how do you recalibrate your emotions when you were just a week or so away from going home, and now the delay's mean it'll be at least another month or so Yeah, that's always a tough one for military folks on deployment. Whenever deployment gets extended at the last minute, that can be tough. The hardest hit people are my family back on earth, it's really tough on them. For me, I just kind of-- I'm here, I'm doing my job. It's more of the same. It's, it's only gonna be a few more weeks. You know we'll be back in June. And so I, I just try not to think about it and just press on with my daily activities and keep on going. The hardest, like I said the hardest I think is for the folks on Earth. Aside from family, family and friends, what do you guys miss most about Earth? If you think about what's going on down there, is there one particular thing that pops into mind? You know, weather. We do not have weather up here. It's sunny and low humidity and 75 every day, and so Just the, the sounds and smell of rain, or snow, or sunny, warm day, you know? We don't get that in. It's an interesting thing. But in a lot of ways, I forgotten what weather's like. And I, I, I really forgot what gravity feels like. I don't, I'll be a in, reintroduced to that here in a few weeks. Scott do you and Masha get to see a great deal of each other? Do you work together on the one year experiment? I know there are two different wings of the station but you guys are both in the in the one year study. You know we do consider ourselves one, one individual crew. And you know for a lot of reasons. You know, we have to respond in an emergency together as a, as a unified team. We you know fly together in the Soyuz. But a lot of our activities are done separately. It's almost like You know, two organizations, sharing two different wings of a laboratory, let's say. So, Misha sleeps in the, the US segment, and, the cosmonauts do some activities down here, but for the most part. You know their workday is spent in the Russian segment and our workday is spent in what is considered the US operational segment, which is not only the US modules but the European Space Agency module and the the two Japanese modules we have up here. So You know we we do see each other a lot but a lot of time its just seeing and passing as he's coming going to and from work in the morning and in the evening and in the other times of day he comes down to his crew quarters to maybe get on the computer or make a phone call or take a little break from his work day so its almost like you know we just kinda wave and passing a lot of the times. [ INAUDIBLE ] in this trip was the the scrubbing of Sarah Brightman's trip to the statement. How big a disappointment was this? You guys were about to get a an international Star up there? Well, I wouldn't say I was disappointed for me. I was kinda of disappointed for her. You know, because I, I had grown to be friendly with her and you know, I know how much she was looking forward to this It's great to get visitors up here, you know. You like the people you're flying with, but you also would like to see new faces. And we're not sure who's gonna be put in that in that seat when the Soyuz launches here in September, now was the original plan. But whoever it is, We will welcome them, just as much as we were, would welcome Sarah Brideman. So, you know on one hand it's, you know I'm sorry she's not going to make it and fulfil her dream of flying in space, but on the other hand, you know, someone else, someone else will and that's a great thing for them. Terry, are there any additional projects you've picked up given that you're going to be there for another month or is the workload such that you never have to worry about busying yourself? Well, yes, for sure, like Scott was saying earlier, a work day is pretty much all day every day. But I think we're in this phase now, we used to be in what we call the assembly phase of station, then we're in utilization. I kinda look at this as a reconfiguration phase. We're moving some modules around. The space walks that I did, and the space walks that Scott are gonna do, are getting ready for future vehicles. And so one of the big projects is to move what's called a PMM module, which is just below the camera And move it, two modules over, basically. And, and, that may be something that we do in this time that we have off. We've picked up some big maintenance on our, on our life support and recycling systems. So we're, we're trying to get ahead on some of the tasks that are gonna be required for the next year. Relocating that PMM module, if it ends up happening, is gonna be a. Kind of a really big task. Gut, you're said to take your first space walk of your career, when is that happening, and how much more training or preparation do you have ahead for that? Well right now, it's a little bit TBD, because the first planned space walk was for Chill Lindgren and, and myself And it's associated with the next Space X. So the next Space X has a hardware component on it that allows commercial vehicles to dock, US commercial vehicles to dock to the International Space Station. And when the Space X gets here we'll pull that piece of hardware out of Space X. It's on the unpressurized. Portion of the vehicle, and then as soon as Chel get up here, some number of days after, we're not sure which. Cuz he was supposed to be here already when that arrived but now that his launch is being delayed we're gonna have to replan that. So I'm not sure, it's probably some time, I would suspect in in August they're supposed to get here. Toward the end of July. Of course, Terry and I could always go out and do an unplanned space walk if something was to break on the space station. So, you know, you have to be prepared for that. As far as training, there is some on board training you do. There's certainly a lot of study and preparation, and I'm sure Terry can attest to that, doing three space walks in a row. So the training never stops. We do on board training, you know. You train for this your whole life and you continue to train and it's you know, you almost think maybe when you get home you'll still be doing training because you know, you're in such a habit of doing it Do you feel-- you've got, I guess, ten and a half months, ten months and a week. How are you pacing yourself? Does that feel like a long haul or are you sort of getting fully in the rhythm? It's one thing I think about every single day. Is that you know, fortunately I had the experience of being up here previously. And I think most people that have been here for six months can tell you that a year is a very long time to live here. Where you can't leave a very closed environment, a very heavy workload, and so I, I think about it all the time. Like I said earlier, you know, we, I work from basically the time I get until right before I go to sleep, so me pacing myself is you know, one of the most critical things I do because I need to have, you know, the same ability and energy and focus and attention to focus at the end of this mission that I do right now. And you know because, you know at anytime we need to be able to respond to an emergency. To stand very long hours if we have to go outside and do a, an emergency space walk for instance. So you know, it's the, the number one thing. Actually safety is first, and the number two thing in my mind is, is pacing myself for the long haul. Wonderful. Gentlemen, thank you so much for giving us this time this morning. And fly safely, and come home to us soon. Thanks Jeff good talking to you this morning. [ BLANK AUDIO ] >> Station, this is Houston ACR. Thank you. That concludes the event. And thank you Weather Channel and Time Magazine. Station, we are now resuming operational audio communication. Thanks. 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