There are several strong lines of evidence that most meteorites come from the asteroid belt. Meteoritic materials thus represent ‘cheap’ (compared to the cost of a space mission to sample an asteroid) samples of the highly diverse, numerous and effectively inaccessible asteroid population. The advantage of having these samples delivered to us is that they can be subjected to the level of sophisticated and highly detailed analysis that can only be done in a laboratory. This gives us access to priceless details on the earliest period of solar system formation, the mineralogy of the asteroid belt, and the processes that have shaped asteroids over the life of the solar system. However, the scientific price we pay for these cheap samples is that we lose what geologists call providence; information on the location, structural setting and context of the sample. That information is vital to understanding how it fits into the story of the origin and evolution of the solar system. Meteorites do...
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Britt, D.T., Lebofsky, L.A. (1997). Meteorite parent bodies . In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_258
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_258
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