Impactscapable of inducing extinctions, like the at least 10-kilometer-wide impactor blamed for the end of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago (SN: 2/4/17, p. 16), are even rarer, striking Earth Thisdiagram maps the data gathered from 1994-2013 on small asteroids impacting Earth's atmosphere to create very bright meteors, technically called "bolides" and commonly referred to as "fireballs". Oneof the important products of an impact cratering event is impact melt. A fraction of that melt is ejected from the crater. When the melt is ejected from a crater, it separates into molten droplets that quench to glass in the atmosphere before landing. Those glassy beads can form a layer of ejecta, both on land or on a seafloor. Earthhas 192 impact craters confirmed and depicted in this map. There are other craters still to be confirmed. Mars has 300,000 impact craters; the moon has too many to count. Asteroidimpacts on Earth have tripled in rate since 290 million years ago. Pictured: In this handout from NASA, the giant asteroid Vesta is seen in an image taken from the NASA Dawn spacecraft Anillustration shows an asteroid impacting Earth in circumstances similar to the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs and plunged the world into darkness. NASA/NCAR Read more TheChicxulub crater (IPA: [t͡ʃikʃuˈluɓ] ⓘ) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when a large asteroid, about ten kilometers (six miles) in diameter, struck Earth.The crater is TheYounger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) or Clovis comet hypothesis is a speculative attempt to explain the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling at the end of the Last Glacial Period, around 12,900 years ago.The hypothesis is controversial and not widely accepted by relevant experts. It is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation NASResearchers Bring Asteroid Simulation Down to Earth. Simulation of a 120-meter asteroid entering the atmosphere at 20 kilometers per second (km/s) and impacting the ground, releasing the energy equivalent of about 100 megatons of TNT. After the impact occurs, the blast wave propagates over the region (colored by contours of theKuiper belt. What of the following sketches shows the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris correctly scaled in comparison to Earth? What is the significance of the circular region marked in the image (with location identified on the map)? It outlines the crater from the impact thought to have killed off the dinosaurs. oIgVQ.