How many meteorites fall to earth.

Numerous fireballs or meteorites have been seen in the sky lately, in the USA, in Turkey and in Venezuela; The big question is: are they falling more than normal, how much is normal, how many fall to the ground every year, according to research carried out by British experts from the University of Manchester and Imperial College London that they carried out between 2019 and 2020 they calculated that about 17,000 meteorites fall to Earth per year, with a volume of about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material that is added to the mass of our planet every year.

The vast majority of this material comes in the form of dust, although the statistics that these researchers have carried out counted fragments of between 50 g and 10 kilos, those of 10 kg were very rare, the rule is that the larger the meteorite, the rarer it is and a curiosity There is a preferential zone regarding the arrival of extraterrestrial material, or the arrival or impact of asteroids on Earth and that highest proportion of impacts is between 45 degrees north and 45 degrees south of the Equator.

There is a belief that the area that receives the most meteorites on Earth is Antarctica, but this is not the case, what happens is that on the ice it is much easier to find meteorites since they are usually black rocks, rocks falling from space have always happened and the answer to the question of whether they are falling more is no, they fall at the same frequency as they always have, there is no increase in the number of natural remains that come from space.

But there are two things that are changing radically. The first is that today practically all humans already have a video camera at hand on our mobile phones and ready to be used in a matter of seconds, making it easier to capture one of these events, to which we must add a billion security and traffic cameras.

The second thing that has changed is that to the natural remains of asteroids and comets we must now add the artificial remains of space debris, which are unfortunately increasing, which is why it is becoming more and more common to capture spectacular fireballs in the sky and also capture how space debris ends up entering the atmosphere and if we are lucky ends up disintegrating in it.

Because unfortunately some fragments of space debris also end up impacting the ground and sometimes in houses, as happened a few months ago in Florida, the object weighing about 1 kilo crossed the roof and two floors of a house in Naples, it was on the 8th. March, just between March 8 and 9, the entry into the atmosphere of a block or platform of batteries weighing almost 2,600 kg that were discarded from the international space station in March 2021 was announced, which is why it is necessary that we have measures to reduce space debris and also that we have a planetary defense plan to protect our world from the impact of asteroids and comets.