The Three Ms: Meteroid, Meteor, Meteorite When these extraterrestrial rocks land on Earth, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to piece together the history of our Solar System's birth and evolution. Others are fragments of asteroids that grew hot enough to develop crusts, mantles, and cores. Some are actual pieces of the original matter from which the planets were assembled. Meteorites are precious rock samples preserving material from the birth of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. Tens of thousands of meteorites enter our planet's atmosphere each day, but most are the size of a grain of rice or smaller. Meteorites aren’t just fascinating space rocks that fall from the sky researchers around the world, and at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural history, study them to better understand the formation and evolution of our solar system. These are known as pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteorite more than 200 have been found. When it exploded in the atmosphere, small pieces of it fell to the ground. This meteor was a large space rock, about 17 meters (56 feet) across. Hours after impact, online videos of the event had received millions of views. Sound waves from the blast shook the region, breaking windows in thousands of buildings across six cities. Instead it became bigger and brighter, then exploded about 23.2 kilometers (14.5 miles) above the ground in a fireball more brilliant than the sun. Unlike most shooting stars, however, this one did not quickly flare out. At dawn on February 13, 2013, a meteor blazed an arc through the sky near Chelyabinsk, Russia.
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