From The Jerusalem Post:
A meteor around the size of a Pembroke Welsh Corgi and weighing around the total weight of four baby elephants struck the Earth near McAllen, Texas last Wednesday, NASA confirmed this week.
There's an interesting metric to use as a point of a comparison. Fortunately, the Post did try to provide a little more detail and context down the page:
According to experts from NASA's Johnson Space Center, the meteor in question was just over 60 centimeters in diameter and weighed half a ton (or around 454 kilograms).
[…]
To put that in context, a baby elephant could weigh as much as 113 kilograms, according to experts from the Denver Zoo. This means that despite its diameter only being around the length of average Pembroke Welsh Corgi, the meteor still weighed as much as four baby elephants.
That was helpful, thank you.
Dallas Morning News, on the other hand, kept the headline simple by just calling it a 1000-pound meteor — although the article does provide some comparative that this is " the average weight of an adult Texas longhorn." Which I suppose is at least a relevant metric for some Texans?
CBS News focused more on the "mysterious object hurtling through the sky" element, for better or for worse — although they do include a photo of a fragment of the formerly-corgi-sized rock with the density of four baby elephants wearing the hide of a Texas longhorn. CBS also added this context:
Meteorites often break into fragments as they head toward Earth and it appears this one did so at an altitude of 21 miles. The meteoroid was about two feet in diameter, NASA estimates.
NASA said the meteorite doesn't appear to have caused any damage. But it did have the power of about 8 tons of TNT.
[…]
About every 2,000 years a meteor, the size of a football field hits Earth, causing significant damage.
Neat!
Corgi-sized meteor as heavy as 4 baby elephants hit Texas [Aaron Reich / Jerusalem Post]
A 1,000-pound meteor plunged through Earth and crashed near McAllen, Texas, NASA confirms [Noor Adatia / Dallas Morning News]
Mysterious object that shook Texas last week identified as a likely meteorite by NASA [Caitlin O'Kane / CBS News]
