Meteors are usually less than a few inches across, and the light you see is them burning up as they hit the resistance of the atmosphere. Less often, larger rocks called asteroids will fall toward Earth, but most of them break up and burn before landing, too. (If any pieces hit the ground, those rocks are called meteorites.) For an asteroid to make it all the way to the ground in one piece, it would have to be roughly 100 feet (30 meters) across or larger, says Paul Chodas. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, he monitors the asteroids that get close to Earth. A bit larger still, and the falling space rock would leave a crater. But things don't start getting really bad for life on Earth until the asteroid is more than half a mile (1 kilometer) across.Scientists know that at least one event like that happened in the past. About 65 million years ago, an asteroid about nine miles (15 km) wide slammed into the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan peninsula. In 2017, Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College London in England, spent six weeks on a boat drilling into the rock that was hit by the asteroid. She was studying exactly what happened to it.Morgan found out that the force of the impact basically made that rock behave like a liquid. The liquefied rock rose up to form mountains the size of the Himalayas before falling back down and solidifying into the 124-mile- (200-km-) wide crater that exists today. The whole process took about 15 minutes, Morgan says. The impact also sent so much dust flying into the atmosphere that it blocked the Sun for at least a year, changing Earth's climate and causing 75 percent of life-including most dinosaurs to go extinct.Paul Chodas's job is to make sure that doesn't happen again. After astronomers find new asteroids in the nighttime sky, he and his colleagues calculate the objects' orbits to see if they might hit the Earth sometime in the next 100 years. They haven't found any on a collision course yet. But if they do, NASA has plenty of ideas about how to move the asteroid off its course and out of our way, from striking it with a spacecraft to blowing it up. "The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they couldn't protect themselves," Chodas says. We do

What would happen if meteors hit Earth?

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