Dale Valerie Pollak, age 10, of Houston, Trex; ;

 Where do meteors come from?

Tonight is a good night for watching meteors  The earth is passing through a swarm of these little space travelers and they seem to fall out of the sky in a shower of sparks  To find them, dust follow the pointer stars of the Big Dipper until you come to Polaris  Then make a sharp right turn and travel about the same distance  There they are, one after another, like a swarm of golden bees  They seem to arch towards us from the region of the sky occupied by the constellation Perseus* For this reason, this meteor swarm is called the Perseids 

The biggest of these bright sparks is the size of a grain of sand and most of them are much smaller  They have been appearing in early August since the year 1862, when a razzle‑dazzle comet took the very same path across our skies  The orbit of the Perseids is the same as the comet s orbit and crosses the earthts orbit at this time of year, Evidentally the brilliant comet left behind a lot of dust and debris~aa it swooped around the sun 

The Perseids are fragments of the comet and~its dazzling tail  But showers and swarms of meteors of this kind occur only about a dozen times a year  and meteors are falling down upon the earth every hour of every day and night  When you look up at the sky, you are looking through the great shell of atmosphere which envelopes the globe  At one time, you can see only one hundred thousandth part of this entire shell  And if you watch closely, you can spot an average of ten meteors an hour 

This means that at least a million meteors collide with the globe every hour  It takes thousands of average sized meteors to weigh one ounce, but it is estimated that the total number adds 1,000 tons of dust and ashes t o thF weight of the world every day,

All of them are space travelers of the Solar System  So far the astronomers have found no visiting meteors from outer space  This can be proved from the speed at which they strike the earth’s atmosphere 

A meteor from outer space in the neighborhood of the earth would be traveling as fast or faster than 26 miles a second  If it is traveling slower than this) it could not escape the mighty gravity of tie sun and hence must be a captive member of the Solar System 

We see the bright trail of a meteor at about 60 miles above the earth and the fiery arc disappears about 40 miles above our heads  We see it for about half a second, during which time the cold, dark speck of dust catches fire and burns to ashes  Astronomers can calculate the orbit of a meteor and its speed with the help of special cameras and the radiotelescope 

In New Mexico two wide‑angle cameras are set up to trap any bright meteor which; falls  through  a certain spot 50 miles, above the ground  , , Two sets of pictures are compared to, give the, orbit and, speed of the meteor  Echoes from radio beams are also used to calculate meteor speeds and they can be used  day and night  Many thousands of meteors: have been clocked  Some travel nearly 75 miles a second But no meteor traveling 200  miles a second has been reported, which means that all  of them are  almost certainly bite of debris drifting around the, empty spaces of  the Solar System