

When a meteoroid gets close to the Earth and enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's called a meteor. A comet is a dirty snowball (dirt and ice) about the size of an earth mountain. Meteorite: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and lands upon the Earth’s surface. A meteoroid is a small piece of asteroid or a comet, typically pebble-sized, but could be a little smaller or a little larger, and often created from a collision.

Meteor: The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes a shooting star.Meteoroid: A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun.Comet: A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of dust and/or gas.Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun. A meteoroid is matter revolving around the sun or any object in interplanetary space that is too small to be called an asteroid or a comet.Three groups - Atens, Amors, and Apollos - known as near-Earth asteroids orbit in the inner solar system and sometimes cross the path of Mars and Earth.For instance, a number of asteroids called Trojans lie along Jupiter’s orbital path. Many asteroids lie outside the main belt.Not everything in the main belt is an asteroid, for instance, comets have recently been discovered there, and Ceres, once thought of only as an asteroid, is now also considered a dwarf planet.

Some meteor showers, such as the Perseids in August and the. The particles enter Earth's atmosphere and most burn up. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the trail of dust and gas left by a comet along its elliptical orbit.
