What’s the highest an object has ever bounced? If I tossed a superball out of an airplane and it landed on pavement, how high would it bounce?
(I’m speculating that the best bounce would come from a solid sphere steel bouncing off of a huge flat block of solid steel? Because a superball or golf ball or anything of that short would have a much lower terminal velocity.)
Certainly. That only applies in a vacuum. In an atmosphere, things that are denser fall faster. That’s why a feather falls slower than a rock.
Steel is also more elastic than rubber, even aside from atmospheric drag.
Meteorite strikes blast a little bit of stuff all the way off the planet sometimes. That’s how we sometimes get fragments from, for example, Mars in meteorite falls here on Earth. If some of the original meteorite blasts back into space, that counts as a very high bounce, right? Though I’m not certain this blasting effect knocks much off of Earth, due to our fairly substantial atmosphere. It must for the biggest strikes, though.
Aren’t meteor craters actually caused by explosions resulting from the meteorite being vaporized?
I’m going to define that as “not a bounce” for purposes of this discussing. A single discrete object must be travelling downward, hit a surface, and then, basically unmodified, be travelling upward.
Actually, my guess would be something of basically 1960’s sci-fi rocket shape: narrow for it’s mass with fins or something to keep it upright. That would generate less air resistance than a sphere. I also wonder if some sort of spring in the center would help.
I can testify from first-hand experimentation (back in the 60’s when they first came out) that the Wham-O brand SuperBall can be propelled only just so hard before it shatters into pieces (all of which then bounce briefly.)
See: Tevis, Walter, “The Big Bounce.” 
When we were kides we through a bowling ball out the window of a car traveling at about 100 mph, it bounced very high.
Does “sorta” count as an answer? The energy turns to heat, and this causes an explosion and vaporizes much of the meteorite (but far from all of it in all cases.) But the phrasing is inexact. Some meteors explode above the ground, but others hit the ground in essentially solid form. The “explosion” is caused by the impact of a solid against a solid, and so I would quibble with the way you stated it.
Quibbly.
Anyway, highjack, never mind.
I presume you are talking about a bounce perpendicular to the earth, of an object accelerated only by the earth’s gravity. It would be possible for a fairly large meteor or asteroid to strike the earth tangentially, and bounce back into space, leaving earth’s gravitational field. It would have to be very large, though, for its momentum to resist a bending of its trajectory by the earth’s gravity toward a more perpendicular path.
An object would also bounce higher if it were shot with force down at the earth, and hit the surface at a higher speed than its terminal velocity would have been, had it merely fallen to earth.
The Chicxulub impactor (the one that killed the nonavian dinosaurs) blasted tektites back into space, and completely around the earth – tektites identified as being from Chicxulub have been found in the ocean on the opposite side of the planet.
Did it hit a kerbstone or something and get deflected upwards? I’m trying to work out why it went high, just because you were going fast.
Not quite what you’re looking for, but are you acquainted with the work of Barnes Wallis? And his efforts at the Mohne, Sorpe, and Eder dams?
No?
He invented the Bouncing Bomb of Dambusters fame.