Instead of lamenting how readily the tips of their scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs)
crash into and damage underlying samples, a group of researchers has figured out how to exploit those crashes to build precise, atom-scale structures, including fences made of straight lines of silver atoms.
Also, for every large commercial airliner that crashes into water (or on land), several hundred airplanes, with a seating capacity of less than 10,
crash into oceans, lakes, and rivers.
In fact, small chunks of space rocks, called meteoroids, continually crash into Earth's atmosphere.
"I don't think most people really believed [comets could crash into planets] until they saw it happen," says Carolyn Shoemaker, a planetary astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.