Could a 10 kg Leonid meteoroid make a crater on Earth?
No, says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object program at JPL. “A 10 kg-sized particle entering the Earth’s atmosphere would cause a fireball event that would be hard to miss. However, it would disintegrate entirely high in the Earth’s atmosphere without getting close to the Earth’s surface. Leonids are traveling at 71 km/s (the fastest meteoroids) and would completely disintegrate even in the very unlikely case they were solid iron.” • Why do lunar Leonids glow? When a Leonid hits the Moon it vaporizes the ground where it hits. The vaporous molten rock glows simply because it is hot. • Why study lunar meteoroid impacts? Part I “Go out in your backyard and look up,” says Cooke. “You can see about about 11,000 square kilometers [of Earth’s atmosphere]. Now look at the Moon. Depending on its phase you could be looking at as much as 19 million square kilometers of dark terrain.” The Moon is a huge meteoroid detector! Cooke believes that systematic observations of lunar meteo
