Earth is constantly within reach of space rocks . Some pass us by, some pass through the atmosphere and burn like bright fireballs, and some appear in our sky as fleeting visitors, leaping through the atmosphere and leaping again. This is the case of this small meteoroid named Earthgrazer.
Collected by the Global Meteor Networking in the early hours of the morning of September 22, over northern Germany and the Netherlands, the object reached an altitude of 91 kilometers.
A meteoroid is a fragment of space rock, comet or asteroid, that becomes a meteor (shooting star) when it burns in our atmosphere and disintegrates, the pieces of which only become meteorites if they land on the ground. However, Earthgrazer did not go down low enough to burn himself, managing to escape and return to space.
How is it possible that the rock managed to "bounce" off the Earth's atmosphere instead of being absorbed ? First, it has to enter the atmosphere at a shallow angle, like a stone skimming water, and maintain its speed in order to escape Earth's gravity, known as "escape velocity ." On Earth it is 11.2 km / s and the meteoroid was going faster. Also, since its angle was very parallel to the surface, the more likely it was to bounce back and get back into space.
