Sometimes small fragments of a meteor, called meteorites, crash on to the surface of the Earth. Some are so big that they make craters where they fall. Many meteorites have been found on the Earth鈥檚 surface.
The best known of these is the Barringer Impact Crater in Arizona, USA. This crater was created by an iron meteor that fell on the Earth about 50,000 years ago. The meteor was almost 40 metres (130 feet) in diameter and slammed into the surface at a speed of about 11 kilometres per second (6.8 miles per second), creating a crater that was more than a kilometre wide.
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