Space Rocks

Asteroid

Small celestial bodies

Planetoids

Asteroid big enough to land spaceship

Trojan

Asteroids that share orbit with a large planet or moon

Comets

Dusty snowballs that orbit the sun

Periodic comets

Comets with eccentric orbits that may bring them to the sun at one point

Non-periodic

Appears more than 200 years or even thousand or million of years

Coma

Unstable atmosphere around the comet formed by the released dust and gas

Meteoroids

Commonly known as “shooting star”

Micrometeoroids

Tiny meteoroids or referred as cosmic dust

Meteorite

Chunk of asteroid that sometimes make it through the atmosphere to the ground

Halley’s Commet

Appears once every 75-76 years

Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud

Origin of comets

Dust, rocks, metals, ice, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide

Chemical composition of comets

High eliptical (75-100,000 years)

Orbit of comets

Provides clues to how water was formed on Earth

Importance to research of comets

1-10 nuclei

Size of comets

Asteroid Belt

Origin of meteors

About 1 inch

Size of meteors

Fragments of comets and asteroids, iron, stone, stony-iron, chrondites

Chemical composition of meteors

No orbit because it is in the Earth’s atmosphere

Orbit of meteors

Provides information of star formation

Importance to research of meteors

Asteroid Belt

Origin of asteroids

1-100++

Size of asteroids

Dust rock, silicate, iron, nickel, olive, pyroxene

Chemical composition of asteroids

More rounded (1-100)

Orbit of asteroids

Provides information of Earth’s interior

Importance to research of asteroids

Silicate

Allows celestial bodies to reflect light

Nucleus

“dirty snowball” made of ice

Nucleus, coma, dust tail, ion tail

Parts of comet

Oort Cloud

Located beyond the solar system where long-period comets originate

Kuiper Belt

Located beyond Neptune’s orbit where short-period comets originate

Asteroid Belt

Located between Mars and Jupiter where asteroids originate

lightyear

Unit of measurment for distance in space