>>DW-TV: Jörg Fritz, How much damage could a space rock of a small size do? Jörg Fritz: Well, a rock of a small size wouldn’t do too much damage unless it just falls on your head, or on your car - but if you had it on your car, maybe, the price of your car would increase, actually.   It's a valuable little rock! What else can you tell us about it? There are different kinds of meteorites, I understand, with different make-ups. Yes, we have a broad collection of different asteroids, which are in the asteroid belt. And this small piece is an iron meteorite - it's the core of an asteroid that had formally been about 200 kilometers in diameter. And in order to get a piece of the center of this asteroid, you have to destroy it by great collisions and break this body into pieces. Now, meteorites have played a pretty decisive role in the development of life. A generally accepted theory is that the dinosaurs, for example, were wiped out by a huge meteor strike 65 million years ago. Is that the only such event in Earth's history? Yes, so far, the wiping out of the dinosaurs is the only even where we can definitely say that was a real one, because of the amount of evidence - you could put your finger on the geological record, and say there is the asteroid impact and here in the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and all other species. There's a lot of mass extinction in the Earth record, and we haven't found any evidence so far that these are connected to cosmic projectiles. Now, there's also a theory that life may have been brought to Earth by a large rock from outer space. What more can you tell us about that? In principle, if for example, life had developed on Mars, then it would be possible that a piece of this planet would be thrown out into space by an asteroid impacting that, and we actually have Martian meteorites and there could be life inside. At the moment, we don't know if there is life, but the ingredients to put together lif...