Since the time immemorial meteorites were something mystical and unknown, so people built their own ideas regarding them. Lots of peoples and traditions fantasized about strange falling track of light in the night sky. Some of them believed it was pieces from the moon or its dust, which spread around the Earth during its rotation. Nowadays, we know that meteorites are the pieces of celestial objects that are flying through space. Most of these objects are comets. Usually, comets are created from asteroids and are quite predictable with its Quadrantids in January and Geminids in December. The route of Earth coincides with the route of asteroids' garbage and every year we can predict the time of meteorite showers.
It can be tracked only for regular showers that are predictable, however, we can see shooting star almost every night if we look in the night sky. The atmosphere of Earth collides with such meteorites every day. How does it happen? Nowadays we know that outer space is full of small pieces of rocks, metals, and different kinds of dust that were created because of crumbled celestial bodies since the times of solar system creation. When we see beautiful shooting star, actually, we see a collision of pieces with Earth's atmosphere. If the object is quite big, and can go through a resistance of our atmosphere, it can hit the ground of Earth. Nowadays, more than 60,000 meteorites have been found on Earth's surface.
METEORITES FROM THE MOON
So, our predecessors were not absolutely wrong, when believed that shooting stars came from the Moon. The story of the first Moon-made meteorite is quite interesting. Back in 1982, when the expedition in Alaska took place, the crew brought back a meteorite that looked not as a usual one. This meteorite later was titled as 'Allan Hills 81005'. It was brought to the Smithsonian Institute, where in the laboratory people found out that it had the same chemical composition, as moon rocks have. The rocks from the Moon were taken from the samples from previous Apollo mission. Some time later the results went public, Japanese scientists send a message that they also had the Moon meteorite. Nowadays there are more than two hundreds confirmed Moon meteorites on Earth.
Pieces that are located in space and happen to hit the Earth's atmosphere are the result of rocks, meteorites and asteroids collapsed into Moon's surface. When the rock from space contacts with Earth's atmosphere it burns due to high resistance of our atmosphere and friction. Small meteorites burn in one moment, because the fire is very hot, and we see a regular shooting star. Bigger meteorites can survive the atmosphere of Earth and land on our surface like famous Antarctica Meteorite. As for the Moon, the same thing happens there, but its atmosphere is not as strong as ours, so objects that enter it are way faster and they left huge craters on the lunar surface. Some of them can be seen from Earth. Also, Moon has less gravity, and after crater's creation the rocks from the Moon are casted away directly into ours atmosphere. Depending on the size of the lunar rock it can burn in our atmosphere or fall down relatively whole on our surface.
MARTIAN METEORITES
They are similar to lunar, but originated from Mars and get into the outer space after some object collapses into Martian surface. By the 2013, only 130 meteorites were of Martian origin, so they are quite rare to hit our surface. Modern scientific labs have information about the composition of Martian land due to the spaceship missions that landed on Mars and collected samples, needed to support such investigations.
The most famous Martian meteorite is called 'ALH 84001', found in Antarctica, Allen Hills back in 1984. It is believed to be one of the oldest parts of the outer space ever discovered on our planet. According to scientists, it has formed more than 4 billion years ago. Some tests concluded that by this time the water on Mars could have existed. The electro-microscope research based on this Martian rock sample showed in 1996 that microscopic structure there looked like fossilized bacteria, which is a sign of life.
