Meteorites Bounce! Dispelling The Fiery Impact Myth

A common myth about meteorites impacting Earth as a flaming missile, exploding in a massive fireball rocketing shrapnel pieces for miles around while blasting a huge crater in the ground is just that, a myth. While it’s possible for a large asteroid to hold it’s cosmic velocity all the way to the ground, most meteorites actually bounce when they impact the Earth. Unless of course the hit soft ground.

This is a series of articles based on common Meteorite Myths that have been propagated by over zealous Hollywood Sci-Fi movie directors, and active imaginations. More importantly this series of articles is about educating people about the real facts about meteorites. Facts that are just as exciting as a fiery impact and great balls of fire.

When a meteoroid (what it’s called while in space) enters our atmosphere it produces a fireballs caused by the compression of the air in front of the body. At this point the meteoroid is traveling between 10,000 and 70,000 MPH, or at cosmic velocity. In other words fast enough to super compress the air in front of the stone and produce massive pressures on the outer surface of the stone and causing the meteoroid to become incandescent and burn bright as if on fire. This phenomenon is now called a meteor. The extreme heat ablates and burns the outer surface of the stone causing regmaglypts (thumbprints) and a black fusion crust that is seen on freshly fallen meteorites.

Typically a meteoroid will burn up completely very high in the Earth’s atmosphere,  a larger body may break apart in the atmosphere at around 10-15 miles up. At this point the atmosphere slows the meteoroid down to a relative crawl. This is when the “meteor” phenomenon seemingly blinks out and the body is now traveling too slow for it to incandesce. It slows very rapidly from cosmic velocity (tens of thousands of MPH) to what scientists call terminal velocity (only hundreds of MPH), and enters a stage of atmospheric entry known as dark flight.

The meteoroid is still falling to the Earth, only invisible to the naked eye. Usually fireballs are seen during night-time hours because they are easily noticeable. Meteoroid was blackened by it’s passage through the upper atmosphere, thereby making it almost impossible to see the night sky. A brief red glow has been reported by some eyewitnesses on rare occasions as the meteoroid cools.

During daylight fireball events fireballs are of course harder to see. After the meteoroid slows to terminal velocity, some eye witnesses have reported sighting black or gray stones flying through the air. Some have even been so close to hear the stone as it passes through the air above them. Fewer still have seen them impact, and even rarer, some people have bit hit by meteorites.

While in dark flight a meteoroid travels at speeds around 200-700 MPH. Not nearly fast enough to do much more than bounce off the ground if it only weighs just a couple few grams. However a larger stone of say 100 grams or more could do some serious damage if it hit a house, car or person. Just recently there was a 308 gram stone that crashed through a roof of a building in Lorton VA.

If the ground soft it will embed itself deep into the Earth, leaving nothing more than a tiny hole. When a rock the size of a baseball traveling at only a few hundred MPH impacts the ground it doesn’t do much more than bounce.