Something Melted This Tesla’s Windscreen. Could It Have Been A World-First Meteorite Collision?

On October 19, South Australian vet Dr Andrew Melville-Smith’s newly collected car was struck by something, leaving damage unlike anything repairers have seen before. The South Australian Museum has requested access to the car to collect samples, and suspects this may be the first recorded case of a meteorite striking a car while it was moving.

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As a vet with two practices more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) apart, Melville-Smith is used to driving on South Australia’s open highways between Whyalla and Cowell. However, he was on the other side of Spencer Gulf that Saturday night when something unprecedented happened.

There was what Melville-Smith describes as a deafening explosion, and he and his passengers were showered with glass. “I thought we’d crashed,” Melville-Smith reported on his clinic's website. “I was in shock; I remember wiping glass particles from my face and being completely disoriented.” The car, a Tesla Model Y, had filled with white smoke and a burning smell, adding to the confusion.

“My wife said, ‘The car’s blown up’”, Melville-Smith told IFLScience. “I thought someone had fired a shotgun at us.” Once they had a chance to assess, both were ruled out. Aside from a destroyed windscreen, the car was perfectly functional, and indeed, kept driving. Not only was there no sign of a bullet, but the chance of anyone being in such a remote location to fire one was minimal.

Kangaroos are a common road hazard in such areas, but no animal would produce a crater where the windscreen melted and sagged inwards. Although it had solidified again by the time anyone looked closely, the glass was still warm to the touch. The travelers backtracked to see if they could spot anything unusual about the location where they were hit, but found nothing. The car’s cameras provided nothing helpful.

When Melville-Smith took his car in for repairs, the mystery deepened. Melville-Smith is an enthusiastic promoter of electric cars, having installed the first high-speed charger in the state outside Adelaide at one of his clinics. Local repair shops told him the cameras for his Tesla’s self-driving mode were beyond their capacity to fix, and the car would need to go to Adelaide, but all of them noted they’d never seen a partially melted windscreen before. One told Melville-Smith that automotive glass melts at 1,500 °C (2,700 °F), and he had no idea what could cause it.

Melville-Smith sent photographs to the South Australian Museum, which initially suspected anything but a space rock. “We get a lot of meteorite inquiries at the Museum and most of the time they turn out to be a rock from [Earth] that is doing a very good impersonation of a meteorite,” said Minerals and Meteorites Collection Manager Dr Kieran Meaney in a statement. 

Nevertheless, as a scientist, Meaney gave the claim a chance. “It was certainly hit by something and it was something hot, and we don't have another good explanation for what else it could have been,” he said.

At this point, Melville-Smith told IFLScience, “The museum got very excited.” The possibility that the car had been hit by a meteorite had occurred to Melville-Smith before, he said, but it was only after the museum’s endorsement that “we felt confident enough to say it publicly. Before that we felt a bit silly.”

The museum will take samples tomorrow, but told ABC News that if this was a meteorite, it would be a first. Certainly, none of the publicity the event has attracted has brought forward anyone who knows of another example.

Some experts are skeptical of the meteorite idea, however. Professor Jonti Horner, an astrophysicist at the University of Southern Queensland, told ABC News that while meteorites get very hot as they speed through the upper atmosphere, they both slow and cool down, so shouldn’t be at glass-melting temperatures on landing.

Moreover, Dr Hadrien Devillepoix of Curtin University told IFLScience that under clear skies, people would have been able to see the event from as far away as Adelaide if looking in the right direction. Consequently, despite the uninhabited location where the car was struck, some report would be expected. Nothing has been heard. No one in the car saw a bright light prior to the impact.

Nevertheless, it is hard to think of an Earthly explanation for the damage, particularly with the clear skies ruling out lightning.

Melville-Smith told IFLScience he is not fixed on the meteorite hypothesis, and claims no expertise on the matter. “I know cats and dogs, not space rocks,” he said. Having been overwhelmed with work that has prevented much investigation, thanks to a local outbreak of parvovirus, he took the opportunity to promote what he knows. “Vaccinate your dogs,” he told IFLScience. “We haven’t seen a single vaccinated dog [with the virus].” Meanwhile, many unvaccinated dogs have died.

Dr Ellie Sansom of the Desert Fireball Network told IFLScience: “I have serious doubts in its space-rock origin. Not ruling out space debris though.” It’s been a fortnight since some space junk landed on the other side of Australia while still on fire, so while space debris is also seldom this hot, it’s more plausible. Space junk landing is becoming more common, but it’s still probably rarer than meteorites. Nevertheless, if all other options are ruled out, the extraordinary odds against such an event may be all that is left.

Melville-Smith thinks the fact that the car was a Tesla in self-driving mode saved him and the passengers from something much worse. “If we were in any other vehicle, we would have crashed during those moments of incapacitation,” he said on his clinic's website. “The [Full Self-Driving] system kept us safe.”

If the impactor was indeed space junk, identifying a source will be quite a challenge. So, we may never confirm the almost unimaginable irony of whether what the Tesla’s distinctive capacities saved those aboard from was a piece of Elon Musk’s other company falling from the sky.