(1) Whether a meteoroid makes it to Earth's surface or not depends on many factors including the mass, initial velocity, angle of entry, composition, and shape of the body.(2) However, from time to time, comets suddenly get brighter, and one possible explanation for this is that the comet has struck a small meteoroid in space; perhaps a small lump of rock, 10 cm or a metre in size.(3) Once the meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere, they are known as meteors and become visible due to the friction caused by air molecules slamming against the surface of the high-velocity particle.(4) It was interpreted as a meteoroidal bolide followed by probable meteorite fall.(5) The term ‘space debris’ in its largest sense includes all naturally occurring remains of solar and planetary processes: interplanetary dust, meteoroids , asteroids, and comets.(6) If you have a small telescope, within your grasp are many thousands of craters, ranging from the grand walled plains to meteoroidal and asteroidal impact craters with their bright ray systems.(7) The moon, after all, had acted as a gravitational trap for meteoroidal material accumulated from space over many eons.(8) Among the different forms of meteoroidal disintegration in the atmosphere described above, the quasi-continuous fragmentation is of greatest interest.(9) In November 2004 the lunar phase was adequate to observe lunar impact flashes at the time of the Leonid meteor shower, as it was the case in 1999 and 2001, because a large number of meteoroidal impacts were expected to hit the night part of the Moon visible from Earth.(10) It is probably natural to think of meteorites - as the meteoroids that fall to Earth are called - as threatening, even dangerous, phenomena.
