What are the chances of getting hit by a meteor?

Answer 1

Asteroids hit the earth every day. The small ones burn up in the atmosphere and fall to earth as dust, occasionally larger ones my hit the earth surface. Most of these will land in the ocean. The odds of a person being hit by a meteorite is minuscule.

Answer 2

Because most meteors are tiny items that burn up in the atmosphere and never reach the surface. For those that do, you have to remember that most of the Earth's surface is water, and even on land there are large areas where there are no people. So for these and other reasons, people rarely get hit by a meteor.

Answer 3

Remarkably low. Let's grant for a moment that many (but not all!) meteor storms are the remnants of extinct comets, we're only aware of a few people in known history to have been hit by meteors or meteor fragments. It's likely that people in pre-historic times have been killed by meteors, and it's possible (although we do not know) that the 1908 Tunguska explosion was caused by a meteorite or comet and that some people were killed as a result. But that's a particularly remote area of Siberia even now.

Answer 4

Quite low; VERY low, in fact. But it has happened, twice in the last couple of decades.

A woman in New Jersey was struck by a meteor that crashed through her roof, and nailed her in bed. It caused a hip injury, but she did recover.

Just a few years ago. a young boy in Germany was hit by a meteor about 2/3 the size of his thumb; it grazed his hand.

And there is a slim but non0zero chance that ships or aircraft which have disappeared without a trace may have been hit my a meteorite.

Answer 5

VERY low. I am aware of four people in the past 100 years who have actually been struck by meteors, including a boy walking to school in Germany last year, a woman in New Jersey in the 1970's who was asleep in her bed, and two people about 4 years ago in South America. Between the people alive then and the people alive now, that's about 8 billion people, so the odds would seem to be about 1 in 2 billion in your lifetime.

Answer 6

Very low - but NOT zero. First, a correction; a "meteor" is the streak of light when a space rock falls into the Earth's atmosphere and is heated to incandescence by friction and compression heating. Since the ISS and other space satellites are in orbit, they cannot be hit by a "meteor"; but they COULD be hit by a space rock that's on its way to becoming a meteor. We generally call such things "meteoroids".

But space is big, the rocks are tiny, and the ISS - or other satellites - are all relatively small, in the great scheme of things. The probability that a rock bigger than a grain of rice would hit are fairly low. Of course, most satellites are constantly bombarded with meteoroids the size of a grain of DUST, and eventually something bigger will hit. That's why they have shielding, and emergency preparations.

Answer 7

The chances of an asteroid from the asteroid belt hitting Earth are very close to zero. The chances of a so-called "near Earth asteroid" hitting Earth are much higher... in fact, they hit Earth all the time, and are seen as meteors ("shooting stars").

Answer 8

Pretty low - a lot lower than the chance of winning the lottery. But it has happened a couple of times. Somewhat high if you are trying to repair the Hubble telescope.

Answer 9

None at all - a meteorite is very small (typically marble to Basketball size) compared to the size and mass of the Earth.