meteoroid

The comet will look like a bright fireball with a long, extended tail, said Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, KABC-TV reported.

"Here at Earth, we sometimes see that process in action when in a short time of say 10 seconds we detect ten or twenty meteors in part of the sky, a meteor cluster, the result of a meteoroid having fallen apart by thermal stresses just before entering Earth's atmosphere," says Jenniskens.

We wandered over to the first area—Space Is Dangerous—and watched a video of a hole being blown through a thick metal plate by a simulated meteoroid.

The third leak incident follows on the heels of the large rupture in December that disabled a Soyuz crew ferry ship, which was thought to be caused by micrometeoroid impact, which is what it sounds like — an extremely small meteoroid.

But on other worlds, it’s more typical to find metamorphic rocks forged in the split-second shock of a meteoroid impact.