Well, it depends on the size of the meteorite you're talking about. If you want to cause a small crater, then go anywhere from a few meters across to a small house in diameter. If you want to cause some minor effects, get something from the size of a large house to 150ft in diameter (Meteor Crater in Arizona.) If you want to cause some major effects to mass extinction, use a meteor the size of 1 mile to 20 miles in diameter or a comet. (One that killed the dinosaurs.) If you want to cause a cataclysmic explosion which can have a shock wave reach Earth's antipodal point, use something +60mi in diameter. (Shockwave goes all the way around the Earth.) If you want to completely destroy the Earth, use a asteroid the size of Venus or larger.
An asteroid or meteor that would cause climatic change, about 1 in 600,000 to 1 in 10,000,000.
Meteor. Meteorites are the ones that do hit Earth.
yes, Numerically-speaking, the orbits of meteoroids dominate our knowledge of the orbital parameters of Earth-crossing small bodies: the meteoroid orbit database outstrips the numbers of observed Earth-crossing asteroids and comets by over two orders of magnitude. Whilst it is often imagined that small meteoroids are predominantly derived from comets through stream formation, and thus must have comet-like orbits, in fact the majority of observed meteoroid orbits are more similar to those of Apollo and Aten asteroids, with small, low-inclination orbits. In all about 69 000 meteoroid orbits are available from the IAU Meteor Data Center in Lund, Sweden, having been measured in various optical and radar observation programs based in the U.S.A., Canada, the former Soviet Union, Somalia, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Australia. Depending upon the detection method used, the original meteoroids producing the observed meteoric phenomena range in size from 100 m to 10 cm. Here the raw orbital, radiant and speed distributions are presented for the major surveys, a common format being used so that they may be intercompared such that general conclusions may be drawn, and the differences between the survey results identified. These data, collected over the past several decades, provide an important source of information on the origin and evolution of the small bodies in the solar system. information by springer link.com
If it burns up in the atmosphere, it is a meteor. If it manages to make it through the atmosphere and land on Earth, it is a meteorite. A really bright meteor is called a bollide.
A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate, or originate, from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth's surface. Intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which may produce greater than 1,000 meteors an hour.[1]The Meteor Data Center lists about 600 suspected meteor showers of which about 100 are well established.[2]
Yes. It is a fairly common occurrence. Most impact events are too small to cause any significant damage.
No connection. Meteor showers are debris from space striking the earth.
Meteor showers occur when a meteor comes too close to the earth and gets drawn in by the earth's gravity. The light you see trailing behind the meteor (shooting star) is Ice melting off of it from the sun's heat.
A meteor is a lump of rock in space. When one of these pieces of rock comes close to the earth it may burn up in the atmosphere as a shooting star. An earth grazing meteor is a meteor that has come close enough to our atmosphere that it starts to burn up, but will still pass us by as the angle is too shallow. It will go back out into space having been deflected by earths gravity.
When a meteor crashes into the Earth, it can cause a crater to form, release a huge amount of energy, and sometimes create shock waves that can cause damage to surrounding areas. The impact can also eject debris into the atmosphere, leading to potential changes in the environment.
A meteoroid travels through the solar system. If it comes close enough to the earth then the earth's gravitational attraction will pull it towards the earth. If the meteoroid get pulled into the earth's atmosphere it becomes a meteor, and by this time it is already captured by earth's gravity.
If a baseball size meteor entered our atmosphere, it would get burned up and not hit the ground. Most meteors that strike the Earth hit at around 20 km/s, therefore if a baseball sized meteor actually hit the ground, it would release roughly 10^9 joules of energy. That's roughly equal to the energy released by the explosion of 1000 kg of TNT.
Well how big is this meteor? Normal meteorites that hit the Earth do not cause any damage to the Earth's crust. It would have to dive many, many miles to even touch the crust. Our many layers between the lithosphere and the crust usually protects us from damaging the actual crust.
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If a meteor was coming directly at a satellite, it could cause destruction, which can affect Earth.
meteor Chase
There is the famous crater in Arizona, known as Meteor Crater or Barringer Crater. It is not actually meteors that cause craters. Meteors are destroyed in the Earth's atmosphere. If they survive the Earth's atmosphere and then land on Earth, they are known as meteorites. So it is meteorites that actually cause craters.