• Question: What is a difference between a meteoroid and a meteorite?

    Asked by amylou to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Maria on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Bridget Waller

      Bridget Waller answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      No idea!! Can you tell me?

    • Photo: Ceri-Wyn Thomas

      Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi there. They are all the same thing, it just depends on where you find them. They are all small-ish fragments of rock, iron and dust moving through space. A METEOROID is still in space, far away from earth and minding it’s own business (like an asteroid, but smaller). If a meteoroid moves into the earth’s atmosphere, it experiences friction from the air resistance, and heats up. If it is small enough, it will burn up in our atmosphere. When this happens, we call them METEORS. You can see this happening at night – we call them shooting stars. If the meteor is big enough, it will reach the earth’s surface before breaking up. We call these fragments, the intact pieces of rock that have reached the earth’s surface, METEORITES.

      There are people in my department who get to conduct experiments on fragments of meteorites – they are important because many of them formed right at the start of the solar system, and so can tell us a lot about what things were like back then.

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