Thursday, August 09, 2012

The Earth gets 100 tons heavier each day.

The Earth gets 100 tons heavier each day.

This massive daily weight gain can be blamed on about 100 tons of meteoroids (fragments of dust, gravel, and even big rocks) entering the Earth’s atmosphere each day. If you stand under the stars for more than half an hour on a clear night you’re more than likely to see a few of these meteors.
However even after centuries of watching these meteors majest
ically tear through the night sky and trying to make them grant our wishes, we still haven’t managed to figure out where exactly they all originate from.
Do they come from the asteroid belt? Are they created in a comet’s death throes? Are they random pieces of space junk? NASA is now attempting to answer these questions with a network of smart cameras scattered all across the United States. So far these cameras tell scientists the size of every single meteor in the night sky, track their orbits, calculate their trajectory through the atmosphere, and determine whether and if so where, they will hit Earth.
Hopefully, as the technology develops and as patterns are spotted, scientists will be able to pinpoint where all these meteors are coming from too.

1 comment:

  1. This is awesome information. Thank you.

    Dino Quintanilla

    ReplyDelete