The quick flashes of light in the sky most people call ``shooting stars'' are meteors---pieces of the rock glowing from friction with the atmosphere as they plunge toward the surface. Most of the meteors you see are about the size of a grain of sand. More meteors are seen after midnight because your local part of the Earth is facing the direction of its orbital motion around the Sun. Meteoroids moving at any speed can hit the atmosphere. Before midnight your local part of the Earth is facing away from the direction of orbital motion, so only the fastest moving meteoroids can catch up to the Earth and hit the atmosphere. The same sort of effect explains why an automobile's front windshield will get plastered with insects while the rear windshield stays clean.
If the little piece of rock makes it to the surface without burning up, it is called a meteorite. There are three basic types of meteorites.

The oldest of the stone meteorites are the carbonaceous meteorites. They contain silicates, carbon compounds (giving them their dark color), and a surprisingly large amount of water (about 22%). They are probably chips of C-type asteroids. Some of the carbonaceous meteorites have organic molecules called amino acids. Amino acids can be connected together to form proteins that are used in the biological processes of life. There is the possibility that meteorites like these may have been the seeds of life on the Earth. In addition, these type of meteorites may have provided the inner planets with a lot of water. The terrestrial planets may have been so hot when they formed that most of the water in them at formation evaporated away to space. The impact of millions to billions of carbonaceous meteorites in the early solar system may have replenished the water supply on the terrestrial planets.
About 10 to 12% of the stones are from the crust of differentiated parent objects. Therefore, they are younger (only 4.4 billion years old). The lighter-colored stones are chips from the S-type of asteroids.


To get an accurate number for the proportion of meteorites that fall to the Earth (an unbiased sample), meteorite searchers go to a place where all types of rocks will stand out. The best place to go is Antarctica where the stable, white ice pack makes darker meteorites easy to find. Meteorites that fell thousands of years ago can still be found in Antarctica without significant weathering. Since the 1980's thousands of meteorites have come from here. For further exploration, check out the Antarctica Meteorite web site at the Planetary Materials Curation office of NASA and the ANSMET site at Case Western Reserve University.

Most meteorites are pieces of asteroids, but a few are from the Moon. A select few, the Shergotty-Nakhla-Chassigny (SNC) meteorites, may be from Mars. The relative abundances of magnesium and heavy nitrogen (N-15) gases trapped inside the SNC meteorites is similar to the martian atmosphere as measured by the Viking landers and unlike any meteorites from the asteroids or Moon. Also, the isotope ratios of argon and xenon gas trapped in the meteorites most closely resemble the martian atmosphere and are different than the typical meteorite. The analysis of the soil and rocks by the Mars Pathfinder confirm this.

Most SNC meteorites are about 1.4 Gyr old, but the one with suggestions of extinct Martian life is about 4.5 Gyr old. The discovery was published in the August 16, 1996 issue of the journal Science. Non-subscribers can find a copy of the article here. Recent studies of the meteorite have cast considerable doubt on the initial claims for fossil microbes in the rock. There is strong evidence of contamination by organic molecules from Earth, so this meteorite does not provide the conclusive proof hoped for. A detailed description of SNC meteorites is given at JPL's Mars Meteorites web site.
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last updated: June 7, 2007