Why didn't the Earth gravity capture the recent meteor that pass between the Earth and the Moon

Do you mean 2005 YU 55, or a different one - the one that went by on Wednesday. Too much speed, acceleration and angular momentum for Earth's gravity to capture it.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?re…

That meteor got smashed into pieces as it got closer to the sun's gravity, by the time it got here it was much smaller than its former size. It suffered an external gravitational field generated by the sun which rendered it unstable. Eventually it got pulled into the sun's gravity, which is much stronger than Earth's and hurdled outwards into deep space. Plus it was a matter of luck here it could have been pulled by earth's gravity and hit a city causing a great deal of damage.

The path of the meteor was affected by Earths Gravity exactly as Newton would have predicted over 300 years ago ..

The wonders of the Internet means that this knowledge is now accessible to 'the masses' (rather than being restricted to 'the aristocracy' as it would have been in his days) - of course comprehension is another matter ....

Gravity, insofar as it can be described as a field, is a conservative field. That means there is no dissipation of energy. If an asteroid approaches a planet from far away, it has, by definition, enough energy to escape back to 'far away'. In fact, unless there's a collision, or influence from a third object, it MUST escape for energy to be conserved.

Taking a guess here, but I'm assuming that the meteor was moving at such a speed that the Earth's gravity did not have chance to grab hold of it. Kind of like when we force ourselves to jump in the air; temporarily we are fighting against that gravity, but since we are unable to maintain that level of force we are pulled back to the ground. For the meteor, although it was within the sphere of our planet's gravity, its speed meant that gravity could not take a hold and pull it into our atmosphere.