MISSION METEORS AND MORE Have you ever seen a meteor streak across the sky Its brief burst of light can be exciting and beautiful Maybe you have even witnessed a meteor shower Comet Dust Meteor showers are caused when Earth passes through comet debris Comets are big dirty snowballs that orbit the sun As a comet gets closer to the sun it heats up The sun's heat causes the ice to disintegrate This releases a trail of rock and dust into space When Earth passes through this trail we experience a meteor shower Meteor Meteoroid or Meteorite Asteroids are rocky bodies that orbit the sun When asteroids enter Earth's atmosphere they burn up in a
The Perseid meteor shower occurs every August It's possible to see up to 100 meteors an hour during the shower bright flash This flash is called a meteor If a large asteroid hits Earth it can cause great destruction But small asteroids rarely cause damage These are called meteoroids Sometimes small pieces of meteoroids land on Earth's surface These are meteorites
CHAPTER 1 HURTLING THROUGH SPACE Our solar system contains billions of asteroids comets and meteoroids Many were created around the same time as the solar system They act like snapshots of its past To watch a comet form you would need to travel back 4 6 billion years Then the solar system was a cloud of dust and gas particles Over millions of years gravity combined these particles They formed a star This star became our sun Swirls of dust and gas orbited the young sun Eventually the orbiting gas and dust particles collided and combined They formed lumps that grew larger DID YOU KNOW The young solar system was a violent place Asteroids and comets frequently struck the planets The moon's many craters are proof of our solar system's rough past
The Comet NEAT streaked across the sky on May 7 2004 The biggest lumps became the cores of the solar system's eight planets Smaller lumps in the outer solar system were far from the sun's heat They became icy comets Lumps nearer to the sun became rocky asteroids
