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Courtesy of NASA and the University of Iowa.
Snowballs Entering The Earth's Atmosphere?
News story originally written on June 20, 1997
The Polar spacecraft has just found snowballs in space. We usually think of snowballs being in our backyard during wintertime, but these snowballs are flying into the Earth's atmosphere.
These snowballs can be as large as a small house! Can you imagine trying to throw a snowball that big? They are not dangerous to humans on Earth, because the snowballs break apart while they are still very far away from us.
These snowballs are entering the atmosphere at a rate of 5-30 snowballs per minute, or thousands of snowballs in a given day. That's more snowballs than you could make even during a long winter day!
Last modified July 18, 2002 by Lisa Gardiner.
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