Do meteorites make a crater when they land?
Most don't. Ordinary meteorites are slowed to free-fall speed by the air and make only a small pit. Only rare large objects, roughly tens of metres across or more, keep enough speed to blast out a true crater.
Cartoons suggest every meteorite leaves a smoking crater, but that is far from the truth. A typical meteorite, perhaps the size of a fist or a football, loses almost all of its cosmic speed high in the atmosphere. It then drops at its terminal velocity, a few hundred kilometres per hour at most. When it lands it behaves like a stone thrown hard: it might dent a car, punch through a roof, bounce off a road or dig a hole in soft soil a few tens of centimetres deep. Winchcombe in 2021 simply shattered on a driveway.
A true impact crater forms only when an object is massive enough to keep much of its original speed, several kilometres per second, all the way to the ground. Then the impact releases so much energy that rock is crushed, melted and thrown out, leaving a bowl many times wider than the impactor. That usually means a body at least tens of metres across, especially a strong iron one. Arizona's Meteor Crater, about 1.2 km wide, was made around 50,000 years ago by an iron body thought to have been a few tens of metres across.
There are in-between cases. The Sikhote-Alin iron shower in Russia in 1947 produced many small craters and pits, the largest about 26 m across. In 2007 a stony meteorite near the village of Carancas in Peru made a water-filled crater around 13 m wide, a surprise because stones that size usually break up.
Most large asteroids that reach the lower atmosphere explode in the air instead, as at Tunguska in 1908 and Chelyabinsk in 2013, causing damage by blast waves rather than craters. Earth has around 200 confirmed impact craters, most of them very old.