What is more dangerous an asteroid or a meteor?

Answer 1

Which one? The Earth has been pummeled by asteroids and comets in the last 5 billion years.

Some are obvious; Meteor Crater in Arizona, for example. There it is, right there. There's even a gift shop and signs. There are hundreds of others. Download Google Earth, and look for circles; circular lakes, circular mountains, circular bays.

But because the Earth's crust is 75% covered with water, many of the craters aren't visible. And because the Earth's crust is active, rain and earthquakes eventually destroy the crater walls.

Possibly the asteroid you are thinking of is the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That happened near the town of Chicxulub at the tip of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

Answer 2

From the NASA JPL's Near Earth Asteroid Website [See Link]

The first thing to remember is that space is big and empty. Which makes the chance that we will be hit by anything from space very small. In much of space, for example, large-sized objects are hundreds or thousands of light years apart. Even the asteroid belt has so much space in it, that we can send space probes through it without any problems. The asteroids in the belt are spread over a ring that is more than a billion kilometers in circumference, more than 100 million kilometers wide, and millions of kilometers thick. Here's what JPL's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking team has to say: "The most dangerous asteroids, capable of a global disaster, are extremely rare. The threshold size is believed to be 1/2 to 1 km. These bodies impact the Earth only once every 1,000 centuries on average. Comets in this size range are thought to impact even less frequently, perhaps once every 5,000 centuries or so." The Asteroid and Impact Hazard page says: "The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. Impacts of objects this large occur from one to several times per million years. "Because the risk of such an impact happening in the near future is very low, the nature of the impact hazard is unique in our experience. Nearly all hazards we face in life actually happen to someone we know, or we learn about them from the media, whereas no large impact has taken place within the total span of human history... It is this juxtaposition of the small probability of occurrence balanced against the enormous consequences if it does happen that makes the impact hazard such a difficult and controversial topic." This is a difficult issue because an impact would pose enormous risk, yet because the odds of it occurring within our lifetimes is so low, it is unnecessary to run around believing that the sky is falling. There are two things to consider: one is that there are many organizations with telescopes trained to the sky, watching and tracking asteroids and comets, compiling a list of potentially hazardous objects to keep an eye on. Many of these objects are decades away from approaching the Earth which gives us a lot of time to track them in order to accurately predict their orbits.

Answer 3

The Earth is hit by a dozen tons of meteors every day, thousands and thousands of them. Most are pretty small, and do not survive to touch down and become meteorites; instead, they vaporize completely and become dust. (That stuff on top of your PC and TV; old meteors!)

Comet strikes are pretty rare, perhaps one or two per century. But comets are a lot bigger and a lot more impressive.

Answer 4

It would depend on the size, of course. A "meteor" is the streak of light that you see when a space rock - typically the size of a grain of rice or smaller - enters the Earth's atmosphere and burns up due to the intense heat caused by the friction of its passage through the atmosphere. Larger space rocks will often explode , leaving tiny fragments to hit the ground.

An asteroid is generally far larger, and is normally just orbiting around the Sun in space. An asteroid in space is not destructive at all, but if it were to collide with the Earth, it could cause catastrophic damage to the planet.

Answer 5

There are two factors involved in how "dangerous" something is; probability, and lethality. First, how likely is it that something would happen, and second, how many people would be killed if it did?

Meteors strike the Earth EVERY DAY, by the thousands. Most of them are the size of a grain of rice or smaller, and never make it through the atmosphere, but a few do. Several times each week, some rock the size of a Baseball or a Basketball survives the fiery descent and lands on the Earth. 75% of Earth's surface is water, and much of the rest is desert or farmland, so it's fairly rare for something to cause any damage, but it occasionally does happen. A few people have even been injured by meteors; a German boy was hit in the thumb by a meteor the size of a pea, and many years ago a rock crashed into a woman's bedroom and injured her.

But there are unexplained disasters; was one of them the result of a meteor? There was an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic last year; did a meteor bring it down, or was it the result of some mechanical defect?

Asteroid or comet impacts are much more rare, but an asteroid is much larger than a meteor. 14,000 years ago something slammed into northern Canada, which some scientists believe killed off the woolly mammoths and triggered the "Younger Dryas" mini-ice age, and caused the extinction of the "Clovis people", a tribe of north American aborigines. The change in the weather may have killed a substantial number of people around the world.

And the most famous asteroid strike was the one 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and 75% of all life on Earth.

So, a meteor impact is far more LIKELY, but an asteroid would be far more DANGEROUS - just because of the number of people who would be affected.

Answer 6

An asteroid is typically larger than a meteor and therefore could potentially cause greater destruction if it were to collide with Earth. However, meteors can still be dangerous depending on their size and impact location.

Answer 7

The isze is mostly the main thing .

Planets are large and big while asteriods are little rocks .

Answer 8

No.