Lessons from Meteorites

摘要

Meteorites, which come mainly from various asteroids but also from Mars and our Moon, provide otherwise unobtainable information about objects in the inner Solar System in both space and time. The presence of meteorites on Earth allows application of the full gamut of instrumentation able to analyze materials from the asteroids (minor planets), Mars and the Moon with state of the art sensitivity and accuracy. Many meteorites include material that condensed and accreted in the primitive Solar nebula and were subsequently unaltered: some contain evidence for pre-Solar nuclear processes. Information in meteorites tracks the evolution of their parent bodies, both interiors and surfaces, the impacts that ejected them and the nuclear radiation history that occurred as they travelled Earthward. Meteoritic material also allows the dating of all of these episodes and determination of the composition of the Sun's surface and the particles streaming from it. This chapter is a brief tutorial outlining this information and indicating how it is obtained.