METEORITES - GEOGRAPHY

METEORITES - GEOGRAPHY

News: AI-powered chemist makes oxygen from Martian meteorites

What's in the news?

●       Oxygen-producing materials made from meteorites found on Mars have been produced using a robotic artificial intelligence (AI)-chemist.

●       The research, published in Nature Synthesis, provides a proof-of-concept for generating oxygen and may have implications for future manned missions to Mars.

Meteorite:

●       A meteorite is a term given to a piece of a comet or asteroid that falls into the earth’s atmosphere and survives to hit the surface.

Types of Meteorites:

There are three main types of meteorites as follows.

1. Iron meteorites - which are almost completely made of metal.
2. Stony-iron meteorites - which have nearly equal amounts of metal and silicate crystals.
3. Stony meteorites - which mostly have silicate minerals.

Go back to basics:

Meteor:

●       A meteor is the streak of light that you see in the sky when a small piece of cometary or asteroidal material enters the atmosphere at high speed and burns up because of the frictional heating from the piece’s collision with the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere.

Meteoroid:

●       Before a small bit of comet or asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it floats through interplanetary space and is called a meteoroid.

Meteorite:

●       Most meteoroids that enter the atmosphere burn up completely as meteors.

●       In some cases, however, the meteoroid does not completely burn up, and the object actually makes it to Earth’s surface. The chunk that has survived its fiery journey is called a meteorite.