The event was actually two years ago. In the time since then, a team assembled and performed an impressive amount of analysis to measure the rock falling in the video and to predict where it had fallen. If confirmed as a meteorite, this would be the first time one had ever been filmed during its “dark flight,” the portion of its trajectory after the fireball when it has gone cold and is falling essentially straight down at terminal velocity. (Terminal velocity is the constant speed a falling object attains when its drag force becomes the same as its weight.)

In the video, it was impossible to tell the distance of the rock from the camera, since a single camera lacks the stereoscopic distance-finding of two human eyes, and thus the team could not tell how large the rock was or how fast it was falling. It could have been a small rock up close to the camera, or a large rock far away. When they compared it to a typical meteorite falling at terminal velocity, it seemed most likely that it was 4.6 meters away from the skydiver, making it 12 by 16 centimeters in size, and an estimated 4.6 kilograms in mass. The shape, albedo, texture, and other details of the rock also reasonably agreed with common meteorites. However, after searching the small region of forest where it was known to have fallen – an area rather tightly constrained by the video analysis – no such meteorite was found. After two years of fruitless searching, the team decided to leverage the power of crowdsourcing to see if others could find something that had been overlooked and thus help solve the mystery. As it turned out, help came all the way from the Moon.