Just as quickly as the news spread of a bus driver being killed and three others injured after a meteorite hit a college campus in India on Saturday, NASA is saying "not so fast."
Despite reports showing images of a five-foot-deep crater at the college in the Tamil Nadu district, NASA scientists were quick to tell the New York Times that the impact from the images identified more with a "land-based explosion" than a meteorite.
Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer, reinforced to the Times that a casualty by meteorite impact is so rare that one has never been scientifically confirmed.
"There have been reports of injuries, but even those were extremely rare before the Chelyabinsk event three years ago," he said, referring to an incident that occurred in Russia in 2013.
The Chelyabinsk incident saw a meteor hitting the Earth's atmosphere and injuring 1,200 people — mostly due to shattered glass from surrounding buildings — according to Russia's Interior Ministry. However, there were no deaths.
As far as this latest incident in India goes, another possible giveaway that it wasn't a meteorite was that the object recovered from the scene of the impact on the college campus weighed only a few grams and looked like regular Earth rock, according to the Times. That's in comparison to meteorites, which tend to be cool when they land.
