Smart Kundassery is presently doing MTech in Ocean Technology in the Cochin University of Science and Technology. As a student he is deeply interested in ‘ancient Indian contribution to science, engineering and technology’. Observational astronomy is his desire and evolution of planetary atmospheres his passion, and strives to evolve an approach to understanding life in extreme environments, especially in the planets of the solar system, other than Earth.

Chunks of stony materials dashing into the Earth’s atmosphere evoke awesome moments of fascination. Laymen generally interpret these dazzling displays of nature as ‘meteors’. In this article, various aspects of astronomical and atmospheric meteors are discussed.

The Earth shares its environment in the inner portion of the solar system with a variety of solid objects that range widely in size. Collisions between these objects and the Earth produce ‘astronomical meteors’. The phenomena associated with the encounters vary from insignificant ones to dazzling displays, to catastrophic displays and even to catastrophic disasters. In the common language, meteors always refer to the extraterrestrial sort. However, non-astronomical meteors are even more common, and they are generally known as ‘atmospheric meteors’.

Read full article (76 Kb)

Address for Correspondence

Smart Kundassery
Department of Physical Oceanography
School of Marine Sciences
Cochin University of Science and Technology
Kochi 682 016, India.