Meteoroids collision with earth?

Question

When meteoroid contacts with earths surfice, does it looses its mass. I am having talk with some friends and we are fighting does the meteoroid looses any mass when it has the impact with earth. We know it looses it when it is traveling through air till it touches the ground. But once it touches it does it really loose any of its mass.

Basicly is the meteoroid the same once it touvhes the ground and once it stops deep in ground?

Answer 1

If you throw a baseball at a wall, does the baseball lose any of its mass
when it hits the wall?

Probably not alot unless you throw it really hard. If you throw it really
hard, pieces of it will splinter off, etc.

The same is true with meteors - they burn due to the friction of streaking
through the atmosphere - and then they hit something solid and break
into lots of little pieces.

So much so that frequently with HUGE meteor hits, scientists only find
little fragments of the original rock.

No mass is lost, however. It may be turned into gas, disintigrate into
dust or small pieces, etc, but he mass is somewhere. That is, there
is no fission or fusion going on here.

Answer 2

Nothing loses mass in the sense that any mass is gone. Mass is converted into other forms due to friction and physical forces. Whatever portion of a meteor survives the combustion of air friction would then be susceptible to break-up forces from an impact with the ground. While it may not lose mass, it likely will break apart to some degree.

Answer 3

Yes it does lose some mass, which is converted to dust/gas upon impact with our atmosphere or the earth itself. How much is lost depends on the size of the meteor and whether it strikes the ocean, hard granite or something in between.

Answer 4

It depends on the type of meteorite involved...there are 3 types: Stony, Iron and Stony iron. I will give you a couple of examples:

The first is the Arizona crater...there was nothing left of the meteorite after the impact..but it left a huge crater 4000 feet wide and 570 feet deep. Second..the meteorite found in Africa weighed 66 tons ( I believe that one is a Iron meteorite)
I hope that helps

Answer 5

When meteoroids collide with the Earth part of it breaks off. If you are compairing its mass in space to its mass on the earth they would be different because of its losing mass. If one of your friends is thinking about its weight you might want to clarify that weight is when gravity pulls on mass.

Answer 6

Conservation of mass means nothing just disappears. BUT, if it strikes hard enough, like with the force of a nuclear bomb, they will give off gamma radiation, which suggests that a LITTLE mass does indeed get converted into energy.

Answer 7

The meteor get pulverized and prob liquified (the outer parts anyway) from heat and pressure when it hits, so the part you find will be much smaller than what "hit". It gets scattered all over.

Answer 8

umm no..... it looses some when passing through the atmosphere at those speeds it burns up some but doesnt lose anything .