For centuries, scientists have sought to understand the origins of meteorites that fall to Earth. Recent research has ...

Approximately 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system formed from a huge disk of gas and dust orbiting our sun. The asteroids seen today are some of the most complete artifacts of this formation that ...

Geologic map of the asteroid belt. Circles identify the asteroid families from which our meteorites originate and letters mark the corresponding meteorite type. The horizontal axis ranges from short ...

Geologic map of the asteroid belt. Circles identify the asteroid families from which our meteorites originate and letters mark the corresponding meteorite type. The horizontal axis ranges from short ...

Unlocking the origins of life starts with understanding how simple space molecules turned into complex building blocks. To do that, scientists need untouched samples—material that hasn’t been altered ...

Ancient space archives: Asteroids are remnants from the solar system’s birth, preserving chemical and structural clues about its earliest days. Life’s building blocks: Samples from asteroids like ...

Ten years ago, astronomers from various institutions, including NASA and SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), set out to map the asteroid belt by tracking meteorites as they blazed through ...

Asteroids, like comets, are the remnant population of planetesimals—those small primordial bodies from which the planets accumulated. Common asteroid types are described in Table 4.1. Generally, the ...

This is a colored view of the C-type asteroid 162173 Ryugu, seen by the ONC-T camera on board of Hayabusa2. Source – ISAS/JAXA, CC SA 4.0. Scientists are assessing the makeup of carbon-rich asteroids ...

Where do meteorites of different type come from? In a review paper, astronomers trace the impact orbit of observed meteorite falls to several previously unidentified source regions in the asteroid ...