• A meteor is just the streak of light we see behind an incoming meteoroid, and not the object itself. (They have been lying to us all these years!)
  • After it hits the Earth, a meteoroid becomes a meteorite.
  • Meteoroids can hit the atmosphere going faster than 270 000 kilometres per hour.
  • Up to 4,000,000,000 meteoroids fall to Earth every single day. Luckily, most are virtually invisible.
  • The odds of a meteorite actually smashing into you and causing bodily damage are really really low.This means it only happens about once every 180 years.
  • The last-known incident of meteorite damages was in 1954 in Alabama, US. It crashed through a roof, bounced off the TV and hit the resident on the hip, leaving a huge bruise. (So you better watch out if you're still around in the year 2134!)

  Source: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk

 

  • In 2004, an incoming meteoroid over 10 meters wide hit our atmosphere, right over Antarctica. When it exploded, it released more than 907 000 kilograms of dust into the atmosphere and affected the weather around the world.
  • Don't worry about Earth colliding with an asteroid - scientists plan to give it a good hard slap and send it on its way. This procedure is called the X-ray Slap and it requires setting off a nuclear device near the asteroid to vaporise it. This would hopefully push the debris and any remaining asteroid off course to avoid a nasty collision with, well, us...? Anyway, that's the plan.
  • Meteorites are named for the post office nearest to where they are found. Unless there is no post office, in which case they are named for the province or best- known local feature. If there are several all found in the same area, they are "named" using letters and numbers.
  • So far there have been about 24,000 different meteorites found on Earth.
  • Some carbonaceous chondrites, a type of stony meteorite, contain whitish minerals called 'pre-solar grains'. These little white specs formed billions of years before our own sun and solar system was born.
  • "Meteorwrongs" is what meteorite experts playfully call ordinary earth rocks which are commonly mistaken for meteorites. The most common cases of mistaken identity are slag - burned remnants from commercial furnaces; magnetite, an iron-rich, dark-skinned rock that attracts a magnet; and desert varnish, a dark coating that forms on some light colored rocks.