US man discovers debris from Russian Space Station

A US man has stumbled upon a palm-sized rock which turned out to be space debris from a decommissioned Russian space station that washed up on a river bank in Amesbury.

Phil Green was looking for arrowheads at the back of his property in the town of Amesbury when he saw a big, green rock in the bank of Merrimack River.

"There she was just sitting there, sticking up like that, and I said heck what is this," said Phil.

The rock was covered in mud when Phil found it. At first he thought it was a rock used to make arrowheads, CBS affiliate WBZ-TV reported.
 

Then he suspected it might be meteorite. He even used a metal detector to check and found it wasn't metallic.

Phil then placed the rock in the yard and forgot about it. It sat under a tree for six years until a friend enquired about the rock.

Phil's sister in law also thought it was from space so she sent it to a friend, who works for NASA, who confirmed what Phil had found was a piece of the Russian Space Station Mir.

When Mir was de-commissioned in 2001, much of it burned up as it re-entered Earth's orbit. The rest landed in the South Pacific Ocean. Somehow, one palm-sized chunk crashed into the Merrimack River in Amesbury.