Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere. You can see meteoroids larger than about a golf ball when they light up as meteors or shooting stars on a dark, clear night.
While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones – bigger than a dishwasher – are not.
Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geophysics researchers like us to study, because we can’t usually predict when and where they will hit the atmosphere. But on very rare occasions, we can study artificial objects that enter the atmosphere much like a meteoroid would.
These objects come from space missions designed to transport physical extraterrestrial samples from outer space to Earth. Because of this similarity to meteoroids in entry, we often refer to these sample return capsules, or SRCs, as “artificial meteors.”
Over 80 researchers from more than a dozen institutions recently worked together to study such an “artificial meteor” – NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule– as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere.
