So, a couple months ago I got back into blender and naturally went to blenderguru for some cool ideas. One of the tutorials was creating a realistic earth, so I did it, and wanted to use that earth to recreate one of his 'inspiration' videos, an animation with earth getting destroyed by a meteor. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zvCUmeoHpw and here's a snapshot of my earth...
I hope that turned out alright... And so anyway, onto my project experience SO FAR, I decided to start with simulating the part of the video in which there's a giant blast of smoke and debris after the meteor makes impact, it's in sort of a cone shape, and comes off slowly then actually starts falling back to earth. I'm thinking how to do it, so I make a sphere of the same size as my earth in a new file and start messing with particles. I get that cone shape with some particles and start with creating that same look that they had, first with line particles, not enough. Then naturally smoke. I couldn't get that certain 'look' they had, the smoke was gray, and I didn't have enough control over the color to get it right. Still I used that and the line particles just because. Then I added a quick weird meteor and got this: [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy0MHSMdkyk[/video]

I don't know what happened to the meteor ball but i don't care that much, you get the idea and why I don't like it much at all.
So this is basically where I'm at, if anyone has a helpful piece of advice on how to get the debris to fall back, or how to make it look better in general, please do tell me!