Karen Loftin, age 9, of Charlotte, N. C.,

 What exactly is a meteor?

Space travel is the news of the day and many of/think that it is the most exciting news that ever happened. Some of Andy’s friends find the man‑made satellites in their telescopes. .The first time a satellite tumbles across the lens, you may feel just as Andy did ‑ scared. True, space travel is exciting to think about, but the first astronauts to take to the skies are going to feel terribly lonely out there in the vast emptiness of space.

Our astronauts, you might say, have only dipped a toe into the vast oceans of space. A meteor has been zooming through space for countless ages. This old space traveler may be no bigger than a speck of dust or a grain of sand. It may be a chip of gravel, a pebble or a giant boulder. On and on it travels through empty space with nowhere in particular to go.

It may be large or small, but a meteor is sure to be made from minerals very like the minerals which form the crust of the earth. It may be made mostly of stony minerals, similar to our rocks. It may be made of metals such as nickel and iron which are the same metals from which, we think, the central core of the earth is made. Some meteors are mixtures of stony minerals and metals. In any case, they are scraps or lumps of dead matter.

Millions of meteors collide with the earth every day. Most of them burn to ashes long before they reach the ground and we see them as so‑called shooting stars. Countless millions collide every day with other planets. The numbers of space‑traveling meteors must be enormous and science has proved that all of them stay within the empty space between the planets of our Solar System.

Surely, you might think, our astronauts are going to collide with meteors when they set out to reach the moon and the planets.

But, we are told, this is not likely. It has been figured that a space ship can go to the moon and back 50 times without hitting more than one speck‑sized meteor. Countless zillions of zooming meteor's can lose themselves in the vast spaces of our Solar System.

It is hard to grasp the size of the Solar System without scaling down to a small model. If we imagine it to be about three miles wide from side to side, the sun would be scaled down to the size of a beach ball. The largest planet would be as big as an orange, the earth would be pea‑sized and little Mercury would be the size of a mustard seed. Even in our small model there is room for zillions of little meteors ‑ and the real Solar System is more than seven thousand million miles from side to side.

There is plenty of room for all those meteors to travel on and on without colliding or even coming near a neighbor in millions of years. And they travel fast. The slowpokes whisk along at a few miles a second, many of them travel at 20 miles a second and a few zoom along at 25 miles a second.