Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
At 2:06 pm Saturday, a space rock about five feet across came apart twenty-six miles above Massachusetts, releasing the energy of 230 tons of TNT. NASA decided to describe the object as “heavy as an elephant,” declining to specify which elephant, leaving residents to wonder whether they had been buzzed by a modest forest elephant or a full freight version.
Does an animated elephant weight more than a real-life elephant? (Henry Mestre/Flickr)
NOAA’s GOES-19 satellite logged the exact millisecond the meteor entered the atmosphere at 42,000 mph. Local news described this as “55 times the speed of sound,” then, sensing it had lost the room, added it was “really, really fast.” The rock itself measured about the width of a beach ball, or a third of a refrigerator, or 0.0000007 Rhode Islands, a figure no one requested and everyone now has.
The meteor burned for twenty-six miles before flaming out, roughly the length of the Boston Marathon. For scale, twenty-six miles is roughly nine thousand giraffes standing on each other’s shoulders, an image that helps no one.
The double boom carried from Delaware to Montreal, a distance of about 7,000 football fields, or about 6,400 rugby fields, unless you count the in-goal areas, in which case it’s 4,400. Homes shook. Pets hid under beds. Officials stressed the object was a natural material and not space debris, a distinction that was of little consolation for any dog still under any bed. They added that it weighed about as much as a hippopotamus on a GLP-1 regimen, repeating “hippopotamus” as though saying it twice might produce one. Everyone knows you have to say it three times.
The rock is now at the bottom of Cape Cod Bay, where it weighs nothing, travels nowhere, and is, at long last, exactly the size of itself.
