Question: @will there be another meator hitting earth?

Hussain Jaffery answered on 15 Nov 2015:

Meteors are relatively tiny and generally burn up in the atmosphere of Earth and don’t cause any damage. The Earth passes through various streams of meteors every year, one example being the Perseid Meteor Shower every summer.

Meteorites (note the name difference) are larger pieces of space rocks that don’t fully up in the atmosphere and make an impact with the Earth’s surface. These are also happening constantly, but with less frequency. Since many meteorites are dark and relatively hard to detect objects for our current telescopes, we can’t really predict their impact too well, luckily they’re not super-large, like the one which helped to wipe out the dinosaurs.

The chances that a large stray meteorite that we haven’t observed yet, strikes the Earth are moderately low, but it is serious concern. We can only see them when they get relatively close – giving us weeks to prepare if one such meteorite is heading our way. New telescopes are now being developed by NASA to start keeping better track of them. Phew!

To conclude, large meteorites/asteroids will crash into the Earth in the future, and we don’t know when the next one will be exactly. However, large meteorites (bigger than 1 kilometre wide) only crash into Earth every 500,000 years or so – which makes them thankfully infrequent.