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It seems like your comment ignores the relevance of proximity in the likelihood that an ejected object with the necessary velocity ends up at Earth. Wouldn't th
by bostonpete 9y ago
It seems like your comment ignores the relevance of proximity in the likelihood that an ejected object with the necessary velocity ends up at Earth. Wouldn't the probability of such an object hitting Earth from Mars would be many orders of magnitude smaller than one from the Moon (like trying to hit a target from 100x further away)?
I always understood the large numbers of meteorites from Mars to be related to the fact that Mars is closer to the asteroid belt and therefore has had a lot more impacts historically...
- Symmetry 9y agoThe levels of delta-v we're talking about here aren't nearly enough to knock these objects out of the solar system. When they leave the Moon or Mars they're still in orbit and will remain in orbit until they collide with something. In the case of a moon rock that means either hitting the Earth or returning to the Moon in what is likely a single orbit so 2 weeks. In the case of Mars it will either hit Mars again or the Earth. Or possibly the Moon, one Mars's moons, or an asteroid but probably the first two. The odds of this collision taking place on any given orbit around the Sun are low but the object isn't going anywhere and eventually, possibly millions of orbits later, it will end up hitting something. So no, the probability that it will eventually hit the Earth doesn't really go down with the distance in this case since we're only talking millions of years for a collision to occur rather than billions.