about midday
Most of the local populace had not heard Lurton Zimbardo 's radiocast , since it had come in just before midnight . The second asteroid followed a near-vertical course and slammed with tremendous force into the ground a half mile from the atmosphere-generating plant . The sun rose onto a land choked with dust . When the dust settled back to the surface about midday , the people of Westcott saw only a crater a mile and a half wide . There was no sign that any human artifice had ever existed on the spot . Almost sixteen hours later , on an overcast afternoon in the empty northwest , the third asteroid struck . Its target was the atmosphere plant located 51 degrees north of the equator and 141 degrees west of the central meridian-southwest of a small crater which was the home of a town called Morris .