Now I'm sure some of you have seen shooting stars. But if you haven't, probably the best time to try and see them is during the Perseids meteor shower in mid August of each year. Now what's happening there is the earth is traveling through a stream of debris that was left by a comet, which last went past Earth in 1992. Around the peak of the meteor shower you should see more than one shooting star per minute. And what's happening there is just very small grains of rocks are burning up in the atmosphere and the majority of those shooting stars are completely vaporized in the atmosphere. But some larger lumps of rocks will make their way to planet Earth, and I have one of them here. This is a meteorite, from outer space. Very heavy, actually. Made out of iron. And this was probably about the size of a washing machine when it first entered the atmosphere and burned up on its way to Earth. Indeed, a few times a year, the Earth gets hit by an asteroid about the size of a small car, but the atmosphere does its work and breaks it up into small fragments that are quite harmless. So, why are we interested in rocks from space? Well, the obvious answer is, just look what they did to the dinosaurs, is that going to happen to us anytime soon? But there is also quite a good scientific question as well, and that's because these, asteroids were the leftover bits, when our solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago. And so by studying asteroids, the contents of asteroids, we can study what our solar system was like when it first formed. There are also theories that the building blocks of life were brought to planet Earth by asteroids, and so we want to study them for that reason. So here's some examples of some images taken with the Faulkes telescope, three nights apart and what you can see is that there's a moving bright object that changes position, relative to the other stars in the picture. Now finding these bright moving objects is challenging but it's not impossible and indeed, there are many amateur astronomers with telescopes in their back gardens who have found many of these bright moving comets and moving asteroids. But if we want to find the very distant, very faint asteroids and comets that are potentially on a direct collision course with earth, we're going to need big telescopes surveying the whole sky every few nights looking for movement in the objects. Now this is going to create petabytes of data, and we're going to be able to need to analyze that very rapidly. And to do that, we're going to need computers. And Andy's going to tell you about them in the next video.