Why does a space probe re-entering the earth's atmosphere not bounce off back into space?

I understand the earth spins at around 1038mph. If a ball spins and you try to 'land' something on it, the object will bounce off. Why not a space probe on the earth?|||Lots of reasons.





First, the Earth's gravity keeps things (and you and me) from flying off into space due to the Earth's spin. If you had a spinning ball with sufficient mass and gravity, you could land something on it and it would stick.





Second, the process of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere from obit causes that object to slow down to about 1/50th of its orbital speed. That combined with the Earth's spin makes the speed difference between the re-entering object and the Earth's surface relatively small. So, there's not enough Velocity to bounce back into space once you've hit the ground.





Third, the huge difference in the size and mass of the Earth compared to the size and mass of a space probe is hard to approximate when you're talking about throwing something at a spinning ball. Say the ball is, oh, the size of a basketball. You'd probably have to throw something as small as a few molecules at the surface of the ball to get a reasonably good size comparison, and you'd have to fill the basketball with depleted uranium to get a good mass comparison.|||It can if it doesn't enter the atmosphere at the proper angle. But not because of earths rotation. That can be solved by placing the space craft into geo-synchronous orbit.|||%26gt;It's determined by the angle of the re-entry (as well as the speed the probe is moving)...too steep an angle and you burn up. Too shallow and you "skip" off the atmosphere and back into space.%26lt;|||The earth does spin that fast, but it has a rotational period of 24 hours. If you had a ball spinning once every day, it certainly wouldn't bounce anything off because of it. Conversely, if the earth were spinning several times per second, like a tennis ball, everything would fly off of it, and the planet would rip itself apart.|||The probe actually does 'Skip' in and out of the atmosphere in order to slow down.


It cannot skip off into space and stay there, because, as each 'skip' slows its momentum, it comes more and more under the influence of Earth's Gravity.