Every year, almost 100,000 tons of space dirt falls on our planet. That's the equivalent of one U.S. Nimitz-class aircraft carrier dropping from the skies every year. Of course, it doesn't all come at once. Each day, about a hundred tons of material hits the Earth. Most of it is in the form of interplanetary dust caught in the Earth's gravitational pull. But on any given night, you might also catch the bigger stuff: sand-grain-sized or even pebble-sized bits of the solar system flaring across our sky as meteors. After their fiery journey through the atmosphere, most of that material ends up as dust on the ground too.
So if you do the math, those hundred tons of inbound space stuff translates into about 10,000 grains of dust added to your car every day. And if you only make it to the car wash once a year, then odds are pretty good that if you write, clean me, on your car's rear window, it will leave at least a few tiny bits of dusty space dirt on your fingers. And it's right there, on your fingertips, that you can meet eternity up close.
(courtesy of NPR)
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