Meteors, Asteroids, and Comets, With Pictures

Its easy to mix these three up! Here's some info so you'll never get it wrong again.

Asteroids are basically leftover chunks of material orbiting in space. These asteroids occasionally collide and change their orbit. The Asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter.

Below I've included an image of the asteroid Gaspra, which was the first asteroid ever to be closely approached by a spacecraft, in the year 1991. Gaspra orbits very close to the inner edge of the asteroid belt.

Try repeating those 3 words 10 times fast.

Meteoroids are chunks of rock , the size of a grain of sand our the size of a large boulder, that are floating around in the solar system.

Meteors are meteoroids that get into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up . These are also called shooting stars. 40,000 tonnes of meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day.

Meteorites actually hit the Earth's surface . This happens a lot, but you can't usually see the signs of impacts because so much of our planet is covered by the ocean, and because they're weathered away.

Comets are composed of ice, rocks, and dust, and are sometimes called "dirty snowballs".

Short period comets come back in less than 200 years, such as Halley's comet, which comes every 76 years (I'm hoping I'll still be around when it comes back in 2061). You can only see a comet when it is close to the sun. The tail is produced by solar wind, so it is always pointing away from the sun. When comets come around, they bring meteor showers with them. They are beautiful sights.