Comets, Asteroids and Meteors

What this quiz asks

• What is a 'shooting star' like the one shown here really?
• What do we call a piece of space rock that survives its fiery fall and lands on the ground?
• Most meteors we see are made by particles no bigger than a pebble.
• Meteor showers such as the Perseids and the Leonids take their names from what?
• Halley's Comet appears on which famous embroidery about the Norman conquest of England in 1066?
• Select ALL of these that are annual meteor showers.
• About how many years does Halley's Comet take to travel once around the Sun?
• In 1908 a huge blast in the air flattened some 80 million trees in a remote area. Where?
• In 2022 NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the small asteroid Dimorphos. What was it testing?
• Have meteorites that came from Mars been found on Earth?
• In July 1994, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into which planet?
• Which bright comet stayed visible to the naked eye for about 18 months around 1997?
• In 1950, Fred Whipple described a comet's nucleus with which famous nickname?
• Order these from closest to the Sun to farthest away.
• Which ESA spacecraft escorted comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko around the Sun from 2014 to 2016?
• ESA's Giotto probe, which flew past Halley's Comet in 1986, was named after what kind of person?
• NASA's Dawn probe orbited both Vesta and Ceres, the two most massive bodies in the asteroid belt.
• Select ALL of these missions that brought samples from an asteroid back to Earth.
• What made 'Oumuamua, spotted from Hawaii in 2017, a first for astronomers?
• Dactyl, photographed by the Galileo probe in 1993, was the first moon found orbiting an asteroid. Which asteroid?