MMeM, Vol. 9 Issue 15 – Meteors, et al.

So there was an estimated 50 some odd foot wide meteor that eventually became a meteorite and hit Earth in Russia this week. It was quite an even that if anything, proved how many people in Russia had Smartphones. In fact, there was a really good shot of the meteor streaking through the sky posted to the Internet which was filmed from within a classroom. What? How’d some kid get away with that anyway?

There was a lot of chatter about the words meteors, meteorites, comets, etc. and just what was the difference between them all. Turns out that according to Aerospaceguide.net, I now wish I’d never looked any of this up:

• Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive body, composed of rock, carbon or metal, which is orbiting the Sun.
• Comet: A relatively small, sometimes active object, which is composed of dirt and ices. Comets are characterised by dust and gas tails when in proximity to the Sun. Far from the Sun it is difficult to distinguish an asteroid from a comet.
• Meteoroid: A small particle from an asteroid or comet orbiting he Sun.
• Meteor: A meteoroid that is observed as it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere – a shooting star.
• Meteorite: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and impacts the Earth’s surface.

That’s 5 words with definitions and requirements when 2 would do the job. This has government written all over it.

Queue all of the TLC/History/Discovery/A&E Channel shows on meteors please. So, caught this show on an agency that collects meteorites for the Smithsonian. They are of course interested in learning everything they can from them and trying to collect as many as possible. To date, they have some 14,000+ meteorites catalogued.

Their favorite continent on which to search for meteorites is Antarctica. They claim the reason for this was that they valued those rocks, excuse me, meteorites the most because they were naturally put into cold storage until discovered. Cold storage. That’s kind of funny, surely they’ve seen the Russian kid’s cellphone footage of the meteor streaking through the sky the other day that was ON FIRE, right?

The second they revealed their favorite searching continent was Antarctica, I thought, well duh! I would find it easier to search for black, dark, metal, objects on white snow easier rather than jungles, oceans, or forests too, but maybe that’s just me.