A Wake-Up Call for Earth
By NASA/JPL-Caltech – https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/asteroid/20180723/main-animation-16.gif, Public Domain, Link
ASTEROID:
There exist millions of asteroids, many thought to be the shattered remnants of planetesimals, bodies within the young Sun’s solar nebula that never grew large enough to become planets. The vast majority of known asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter or are co-orbital with Jupiter (the Jupiter Trojans). However, other orbital families exist with significant populations, including the near-Earth objects. The sizes of asteroids varies greatly; the largest, Ceres, is almost 1,000 km (625 mi) across.
METEOR:
Asteroid, once it hits our atmosphere it’s a METEOR.
A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star or falling star, is the visible passage of a glowing meteoroid, micrometeoroid, comet or asteroid through Earth’s atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a streak of light via its rapid motion and sometimes also by shedding glowing material in its wake.
METEORITES:
The pieces that don’t burn up and hit the ground are called METEORITES.
We did not see this one coming. When the meteor entered the earth’s atmosphere the estimated size of the meteor is eleven tons, that would be the size of a small house.
A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from an object, such as a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid, that originates in outer space and survives its passage through the atmosphere to reach the surface of a planet or moon. As of 2018, there are more than 59,200 well-documented meteorite finds.