I suspect that, if we take the crater and all that at face value, it hit the ground first and then he was hit by shrapnel. I'm having a hard time with that: if it hit the ground hard enough to blast a small crater, then it should've done a whole lot more damage to the boy than cause a three-inch scar. The article claims the boy was hit first, then the object hit the ground, carving out a one-foot crater. It would be moving at maybe 200 kph when it hit the ground, not 50,000 kph as claimed in the article. Still 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface, a meteoroid that size would slow within a few seconds from hypersonic to subsonic speeds, then basically fall the rest of the way to the ground. Meteoroids - the solid bit of rock, iron, ice, or whatever - move very rapidly in space relative to the Earth, but decelerate savagely as they ram through our atmosphere. Second, there's no way it was moving that fast to begin with. Now, it's possible the meteorite simply barely grazed him, but the article isn't clear. That speed is about ten times faster than a rifle bullet, and had it actually hit him at that velocity a rock the size of a pea would've torn a hole through him the size of a basketball. Bzzzzt! Wrong! If it had been moving that fast a direct hit would've killed him. First, the headline: "14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite". However, the way the story is reported almost certainly has some of its facts wrong. The odds of it happening are very low, but not zero (a woman in Sylacauga, Alabama was hit in 1954 ), and while it's good to be skeptical of things like this, there's no reason to automatically assume it's baloney. If true, this is quite a story! Let me be clear to start: it's entirely possible that this story is in fact real, and the boy was struck by a meteorite. A 14 year old German boy is claiming he was hit by a meteorite.
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