Image caption The meteorite left a crater inside the campus of Bharathidasan Engineering College in Vellore 
 
 Indian scientists have been asked to verify claims that a man died after being hit by a meteorite in southern Vellore city. 
 
 Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram said on Sunday that Kamraj, a bus driver, died after a meteorite fell on a college campus. 
 
 Scientists said tests were needed to confirm that the rock was a meteorite. 
 
 If confirmed, experts said this would be the first such death in nearly 200 years. 
 
 According to a list prepared by the International Comet Quarterly, a man was killed in a "meteorite fall" in India in 1825. 
 
 PK Senthilkumari, chief of Vellore police, told The Hindu that a "small stone weighing about 10g was recovered from the spot" at Bharathidasan Engineering College. 
 
 Image copyright Tamil Nadu Police Image caption Further tests were needed to confirm that the darkish rock was actually a meteorite 
 
 "We have requested scientists to come and examine the object." 
 
 Kamraj was working in the campus when the object fell and caused a loud explosion. It left a crater in the ground and blew out glass windows in the adjoining buildings. 
 
 The victim "sustained serious injuries and died while on the way to the hospital," Ms Jayaram said. 
 
 The government has announced a financial aid of 100,000 (£1,000;$1,441) for Kamraj's family. 
 
 Meteors are chunks of rock and debris that burn up as they plummet through Earth's atmosphere. Meteorites are larger, more durable objects that survive heating in the atmosphere and land on Earth. ||||| A meteorite crashed into an engineering college in Vellore district on Saturday, causing an explosion that killed one man and injured three others, the Tamil Nadu government said on Sunday.Scientists, however, said it wasn't clear how the government concluded that a meteorite strike caused the blast. There has been no established death due to a meteorite hit in recorded history, they said.If a meteorite indeed caused the death, bus driver Kamaraj will be the first person ever to have died in a meteorite strike. Saturday's blast also injured two gardeners and a student.“You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time,“ is how astronomer and author of the book, Falling Stars: A Guide to Meteors & Meteorites Michael Reynolds describes the likelihood of such an event in a National Geographic report.Regardless of the scepticism of experts, chief minister J Jayalalithaa on Sunday said the government would pay compensation of Rs 1 lakh to Kamaraj's family .The three people injured in the explosion will receive Rs 25,000 each, she said.Witnesses said the blast left a crater 5ft deep and 2ft wide. Policemen recovered a black, pockmarked stone weighing 11g from the blast site.A police officer said the department would consult experts from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru and ask them for a detailed analysis of the stone to ascertain whether it is debris from a meteorite. A team of experts from the institute will visit the site on February 8.A bomb squad from Chennai took debris samples on Sunday for analysis at Regional Forensic Science Laboratory in Mylapore. Police said preliminary investigation by police forensics experts ruled out the possibility that explosives caused the blast.“We did not find any trace of explosive substances, so we ruled out the possibility that explosives caused the blast,“ an investigating officer said. “We will wait for a final autopsy report on the body of driver Kamaraj and the report from the forensic lab to confirm what triggered the explosion.“The blast, which took place during class hours on Saturday when students, teachers and other staff were within the college's main building, shattered several windowpanes and damaged the windscreens of buses parked nearby . Police said Kamaraj went to wash his face at a tap near a water tank in the parking lot of the college when the explosion occurred around noon on Saturday . Thick smoke engulfed the area, witnesses said. A student, Santhosh, and two gardeners, Sasi and Murali, were injured. The blast deafened Santhosh, although doctors could not immediately say if the condition would be permanent.The first person in history that a meteorite is confirmed to have hit was American Ann Hodges, 'National Geographic' reported. A softball-size hunk of black rock broke through the ceiling of her house in Sylacauga, Alabama, in November 1954 and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise. Scientists closely watch space bodies that come to earth and predict in advance when a meteor large enough to stay intact after burning up in the atmosphere is going to hit the planet.“Organizations like International Meteor Organization have already put out the calendar for 2016 -for the days we can expect meteor showers and if there are any chances of them hitting earth. These occurrences are catalogued for the benefit of stargazers,“ said Isro Mars Orbiter Mission project director V Adimurthy.“They even predict the time of the meteor showers and are almost never wrong,“ he said. “The last meteor shower was on January 3 and the next one is between April 22 and 23. There is nothing for February."
– Whatever it was that killed a bus driver in India on Saturday probably didn't travel through untold millions of miles of space to get there, according to NASA scientists. The 11-gram rock recovered from a college campus in Tamil Nadu is still being analyzed, but NASA scientists say that from photos alone, the incident that killed one person and injured three others appears to have been "a land-based explosion" instead of the first recorded death from a meteorite strike in history, the New York Times reports. The BBC reports that police asked scientists to examine the small stone found in a crater at Bharathidasan Engineering College after Saturday's explosion. The dean of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics tells the Times that institute experts are looking at samples of the rock. "Considering that there was no prediction of a meteorite shower and there was no meteorite shower observed, this certainly is a rare phenomena if it is a meteorite," he says. It's not clear what else could have caused the explosion. A police spokesman tells the Times of India that they "did not find any trace of explosive substances" and are now awaiting the results of forensic tests and an autopsy of the bus driver.