Solar system

What Are The Differences Between An Asteroid, Comet, Meteoroid, Meteor and
Meteorite?

Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun

.Comet: A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in
sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of
dust and/or gas.

Meteoroid: A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun.

Meteor: The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth's
atmosphere and vaporizes; a shooting star.

Meteorite: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth's atmosphere
and lands upon the Earth's surface.

Size and Frequency

Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized
particles.

About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates

an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface.

Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and
causes significant damage to the area.

Only once every few million years, an object large enough to threaten Earth's
civilization comes along. Impact craters on Earth, the moon and other planetary
bodies are evidence of these occurrences.
Space rocks smaller than about 25 meters (about 82 feet) will most likely burn up
as they enter the Earth's atmosphere and cause little or no damage.

If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little
more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the
impact area.

We believe anything larger than one to two kilometers (one kilometer is a little
more than one-half mile) could have worldwide effects. At 5.4 kilometers in
diameter, the largest known potentially hazardous asteroid is Toutatis.

By comparison, asteroids that populate the main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter, and pose no threat to Earth, can be as big as 940 kilometers (about 583
miles) across.

How is an Asteroid Orbit Calculated?

An asteroid's orbit is computed by finding the elliptical path about the sun that
best fits the available observations of the object. That is, the object's computed
path about the sun is adjusted until the predictions of where the asteroid should
have appeared in the sky at several observed times match the positions where
the object was actually observed to be at those same times. As more and more
observations are used to further improve an object's orbit, we become more and
more confident in our knowledge of where the object will be in the future.