“Just out of curiosity, do you have a reference for that?”
Earth Loses 50,000 Tonnes of Mass Every Year
February 5, 2012
According to some calculations, the Earth is losing 50,000 tonnes of mass every single year, even though an extra 40,000 tonnes of space dust converge onto the Earth’s gravity well, it’s still losing weight.
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http://scitechdaily.com/earth-loses-50000-tonnes-of-mass-every-year/
Getting a Handle on How Much Cosmic Dust Hits Earth
Does Earth have a dust build-up problem?
Estimates vary of how much cosmic dust and meteorites enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, but range anywhere from 5 to 300 metric tons, with estimates made from satellite data and extrapolations of meteorite falls. Thing is, no one really knows for sure and so far there hasn’t been any real coordinated efforts to find out. But a new project proposal called Cosmic Dust in the Terrestrial Atmosphere (CODITA) would provide more accurate estimates of how much material hits Earth, as well as how it might affect the atmosphere.
“We have a conundrum – estimates of how much dust comes in vary by a factor of a hundred,” said John Plane from University of Leeds in the UK. “The aim of CODITA is to resolve this huge discrepancy.”
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http://www.universetoday.com/94392/getting-a-handle-on-how-much-cosmic-dust-hits-earth/
Mass accumulation of Earth from interplanetary dust, meteoroids, asteroids and comets
Sandra Drolshagen1, Jana Kretschmer1, Detlef Koschny2,3, Gerhard Drolshagen2, Björn Poppe1
1 Universitätssternwarte Oldenburg, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstr. 114-118, D-26129 Oldenburg, Germany
sandra.drolshagen@uni-oldenburg.de
2 European Space Agency, ESA/ESTEC, Keplerlaan 1, NL-22001 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands
3 Chair of Astronautics, TU Munich, Boltzmannstr. 17, D-85748 Garching, Germany
The goal of this paper is to determine the mass that reaches the Earth as interplanetary material. For the large objects the flux model by Brown et al. (2002) was used which is valid for bodies greater than 1 m and is based on sensor data of fireballs that entered the Earth atmosphere. For the small sizes the flux model by Grün et al. (1985) was used, which describes the mass flux at 1 AU for meteoroids in the mass range 10-18 g to about 100 g. The Grün flux was converted to 100 km height by taking the Earth attraction into account and all units were adjusted to compare the model with the one by Brown. In a second step both models were combined by an interpolation, which lead to a flux model that covers 37 orders of magnitude in mass. Using recent measurements and alternative flux models the uncertainties of the obtained model was estimated. Recent measurements include in-situ impact data on retrieved space hardware and optical meteor data. Alternative flux models are e.g. a NASA model for large sizes that is an extrapolation of known Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and a model by Halliday et al. (1996) which is based on optical measurements of fireballs. Up to a diameter of 1 km the total calculated mass influx is 54 tons per day.
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http://www.imo.net/imc2015/2015-24-drolshagensandra-final.pdf