In Meteor Crater it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground.

This is one very large crater. Geologists love craters, because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it, and you can see what's below the surface.

Crater, impact crater

As I told you, geologists love craters.

There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called Meteor Crater.

So, this is called Victoria Crater, which is about a few football fields in size.

Why didn't it make a bigger crater?

So what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater, and the Rover is going down now, measuring, you know, the properties and analyzing the rocks as it's going down, you know, that canyon.

Here is how big of a crater was left.

Rocks

Rocks

We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left.

Now, this is not a 200 mile wide crater, but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage.

Now, people like getting their names on things, on craters on the moon or new species of animals.

It's that meteor.

Lake Manicouagan, a ring shaped lake in Quebec, Canada, is all that remains of a crater from a massive impact over 200 million years ago.

It's no meteor. That's for sure.

Thus, the interplanetary dust is not represented by any of the meteorites in our collections and in all likelihood micrometeorites represent the silicate portion of comets.There is still no consensus on the origin of these crystalline melt droplets after which the most common meteorites, the chondrites, are named.

The main mass of infalling matter on Earth is related to rare meteorite classes (CM and CR carbonaceous chondrites) but has mineralogical and bulk chemical features of its own.

The very unusual Kaidun chondrite is a chondrite breccia consisting of a variety of highly oxidized and highly reduced lithologies.

From a meteorite from space, we re over here with an original Sputnik.

What about these meteor machines?

Several meteorite impact craters and impact products have been studied, including materials from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which is currently believed to be the crater responsible for the mass extinctions at the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago.

Some of them are smaller.

They've located that second meteor.

In spite of the concentration of its resources on the study of cosmic dust (micrometeorites), the Department was able to investigate a large spectrum of meteoritic or planetary subjects.

Meteorites delivered chemistry, and perhaps membranes, too.

Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992.

The needle isn't pointing north. It's pointing toward the meteor.

And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in.

And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites.

The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock, and that's much more crumbly, so it blew up in the air. Either way, these are tremendous explosions, 20 megatons.

The result of this work showed that Antarctic micrometeorites are a separate class of extraterrestrial material, with properties that are different from those of known meteorite classes and interplanetary dust particles.

There must have been another cylinder down here. They cleared everyone out.

That meteor is either very light, which is unheard of, or it's hollow.

A cylinder reported by Huntington Beach. That's a job for the Navy.

The formation of craters and associated effects of asteroid and comet impacts on the Earth are currently being analysed in a theoretical study involving advanced computer modelling and simulations.

This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts.

It turns out that these things don't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage.

Now, when these things blow up, they're not going to do global ecological damage.

We're trying to locate the second meteor that landed here at midnight.

Also studied were the isotopic composition of various tektites (rare natural glasses that form in meteorite impacts).

The purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about.

The energy from one square dance could send the meteor back home.

They ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it.