For the most part, their fiery fragments burn up in the atmosphere but sometimes these extraterrestrial visitors will land on earth.
Finding meteorites from space is quite a challenge, but a trail-blazing plan aims to track the path of meteors all the way to the ground.
Fireballs Aotearoa is a community-led project that uses a network of sky-facing cameras to record the trajectory of objects in the night sky.
Funded by the Otago Participatory Science Platform, the project hopes to recover meteorites falling to the ground in New Zealand.
University of Otago second-year masters student Thomas Stevenson is the research assistant and co-ordinator of the project.
Together they form a gridwork of cameras spaced some distance apart.
"Each camera captures a certain portion of the night sky."
Each camera has its own tiny Raspberry Pi-sized computer that is able to capture images and data about meteorites travelling across the sky.
"We can actually triangulate the path of the meteorite."
The cameras are programmed to detect objects that are of a certain intensity and speed.
"They are looking out for objects that are very bright and very fast-moving," Mr Stevenson said.
The cameras can capture still images and from that a time-lapse video can be created to show the path of a meteorite across the sky.
Extrapolating data gathered from all the cameras, information could be gleaned on where a meteorite might have fallen to earth.
This was the ultimate goal of the project and could lead to community-led efforts to locate that meteorite with the help of a map and metal detectors to narrow down the location.
Mr Stevenson said discovering a meteorite would be really special.
"So far only nine meteorites have ever been found in New Zealand, [so] we would really like to find the 10th one using this network."
