Skydiver's Near Miss with Meteorite Captured on Video

A Norwegian skydiver managed to capture the moment a speeding meteorite nearly brought his jump to an abrupt and fatal end.

Anders Helstrup of the Oslo Parachute Club captured the first ever video footage of a meteorite travelling through the air after its flame had gone out.

"I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn't register what was happening," Helstrup told Norwegian TV channel NRK.no.

"When we stopped the film, we could clearly see something that looked like a stone. At first it crossed my mind that it had been packed into a parachute, but it's simply too big for that."

A geologist confirmed that a meteoroid had exploded about 20km above Helstrup and his fellow skydivers.

A meteoroid will slow down when it enters the earth's atmosphere as its molecules ionise, creating a blazing trail of flames across the sky as it turns into a meteorite.

After the flames go out, the meteorite enters a stage known as dark flight, where it falls straight to earth.

Finding the meteorites

"We just have to find out exactly where Anders was when the meteorite passed. At that moment the meteorite was falling straight down at about 300km/h," said geologist Hans Amundsen.

Since the incident in summer 2012, Helstrup and his new-found group of meteorite enthusiasts have been searching without success for meteorite pieces near the jump location.

The initial search area of one and a half square kilometres has been narrowed down to 10,000 square metres.

They have asked the international meteorite community to help them.

"Now nerds and creative people from all over the world can have a go," said Amundsen. "It's certainly much less likely than winning the lottery three times in a row."

The website is still under construction but meteorite enthusiasts can view videos of the jump on the Dark Flight YouTube channel.