Letter: Sofa and no further

From Bob Cowley

It has been widely reported that a meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in New Zealand and rebounded off the sofa, making a second hole in the ceiling (19 June, p 12).

Wait a minute. This rock hurtled around space for 4.5 billion years, before heading towards Earth at around 50,000 kilometres per hour, penetrated 100 kilometres of Earth’s atmosphere, smashed through a roof and a ceiling, and then… bounced off a sofa?

What are the special properties of sofas? Has NASA been told?

You can cancel all those expensive plans for deflecting life-threatening asteroids with improbable combinations of nuclear warheads. All you need to do is build a giant sofa at the projected impact site, and bounce that sucker right back where it came from.

Oxford, UK