The veterinarian believed it was a meteorite and contacted SA Museum to investigate and provided the windscreen for analysis.<\/p>\n
Kieran Meaney said they had hoped the object was a meteorite, but the evidence was just not there. (ABC News: Sarah Maunder)<\/p>\n
Mineralogy and meteorites collection manager Kieran Meaney said while they had hoped the object was a meteorite, the evidence did not point towards “anything that’s come from space”.<\/p>\n
“In science you shouldn’t really go into it wanting a particular outcome,” Dr Meaney said, “but we really wanted this to be a meteorite”.<\/p>\n
“Because this would be one of the only specimens from South Australia where someone’s actually seen it hit the ground, or a car in this case.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While the mystery object was initially thought to have been so hot it melted and deformed the windscreen glass, Dr Meaney said they could not find evidence to back this up.<\/p>\n
The scientists hoped debris of the object would be found in the windscreen cracks, but no fragments were recovered to test.<\/p>\n
![\"Circular](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/c0477cbd42620fd5684db90ecf77c0b8\")
<\/p>\n
Scientists had hoped to find fragments of the unidentified object lodged in the windscreen to analyse. (Supplied: Andrew Melville-Smith)<\/p>\n
Further questioning the meteorite hypothesis, the Australian Space Agency confirmed it did not detect any objects entering the atmosphere at the time of the incident.<\/p>\n
“We also looked at data from the Desert Fireball Network, which is a network of telescopes that track meteorites and shooting stars in the skies above Australia,” Dr Meaney said.<\/p>\n
“They didn’t pick up anything either.”<\/p>\n
Dr Meaney said they were “at a bit of a loss” to explain why Dr Melville-Smith reported the windscreen was hot as a stone getting flicked up off the road would not be very hot.<\/p>\n
“There’s still these little details gnawing in the back of my mind that I don’t think we’re ever going to get a conclusive answer on,” they said.<\/p>\n
“If only I was there.”<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/b5b69087ec7fe19d2a0f46fb973a5dd9\")
<\/p>\n
No-one’s yet to figure out what caused the damage to Dr Andrew Melville-Smith’s car. (ABC North & West SA: George Yankovich)<\/p>\n
Dr Meaney said they had spoken to Dr Melville-Smith since the investigation concluded and encouraged people to stay curious about what could be entering the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
“We’ve certainly got a lot more satellites in space than ever before and small pieces of rocket coming down all the time,”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
they said.<\/p>\n
While most of the SA Museum’s meteorite inquiries come back as “a rock from Earth doing a very good impersonation of a meteorite”, Dr Meaney said people should not be afraid to continue reaching out.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes these crazy stories do turn out to be true,” they said.<\/p>\n
“If no-one actually makes the effort to contact us and let us know then we might be missing out on something amazing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The South Australian Museum says it is confident that damage to a car travelling on the Augusta Highway…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":458237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[209579,4740,2332,209582,17187,209583,9457,50,209580,209581,7829],"class_list":{"0":"post-458236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-andrew-melville-smith","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-car","11":"tag-kieran-meaney","12":"tag-meteorite","13":"tag-mineralogy-and-meteorites-collection","14":"tag-mystery","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-sa-museum","17":"tag-space-object","18":"tag-tesla"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115747516653353087","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}