How Meteorite Hunters Know Where to Look for Their QuarryĪlthough countless meteorites fall to Earth each year, finding them is tricky. The impact blasts out the crater, melts some of the rock, and scatters fragments far and wide. The force and pressure of the collision vaporize parts of the meteorite, as well as the ground it hits. When a large incoming body hits Earth, the result is a crater. Without erosion by wind and rain, those pits remain intact for billions of years and preserve the cratering history of the solar system. The Moon and other airless worlds are pockmarked with craters of all sizes. Most of the craters left over from those ancient impacts have eroded away or been covered by lava flows and vegetation. Early in its history, Earth was bombarded by countless incoming objects. On Earth, the largest objects to survive a trip through our atmosphere blast out huge impact scars. Craters range from microscopic pits made by very small projectiles to huge holes in the ground made by very large objects. The size of an incoming object affects the size of the “splash” it makes and the amount of ejected material deposited around the site. Craters are the scars left on planetary landscapes by impacts and collisions. City-size Ida was once part of a larger asteroid smashed in a collision.Ĭomets and asteroid fragments have hit all of the solar system’s planets and moons.

Vesta is about 320 miles (515 km) in diameter, and it looks much like it did when it first formed. Tiny chips of asteroids, however, fall through our atmosphere all the time.Īsteroids are much smaller than Earth.

If one were to hit our planet, it could cause a catastrophe like the one that killed the dinosaurs. There are more than a thousand of these Earth-approaching asteroids. Occasionally, a collision knocks one toward Earth. Most Asteroid Belt objects are not a threat to us because they tend to stay in their orbits around the Sun. Most are found between Mars and Jupiter in the Asteroid Belt. Countless numbers of them orbit through interplanetary space. Many of these “mini-planets” were shattered by collisions with one another. Most meteorites come from asteroids, the remnants of smaller planetary bodies that formed at the same time, and out of the same basic material, as Earth and other rocky planets. They come from asteroids and from the surface of the Moon and Mars. Meteorites have their origins in the larger bodies of the solar system. A few rare meteorites come from the Moon and Mars. When asteroids collide, they scatter rock fragments throughout space. Larger pieces of the sky generally come from asteroids, or minor planets.

The smallest particles generate very little friction with our atmosphere and drift gently down to the surface. When Earth’s orbit takes us through those dust trails, the material enters our atmosphere and vaporizes. As they orbit the Sun, Comets scatter dust along their paths. The smallest and most plentiful particles come from comets, which contain ice and dust. Anything that survives the trip and lands on the surface is then called a meteorite. The resulting flashes of light in the sky are meteors. The smaller ones burn up because of friction with air molecules. As Earth’s orbit takes us through this debris, pieces of it enter our atmosphere. It is filled with dust shed from comets and fragments of broken asteroids. The space between the planets is not empty. Pieces of comets and asteroids fall from space and cause the flashes of light in the sky that we see as meteors.

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