Abstract
Meteorites, micrometeorites and interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) represent collisional derived fragments from asteroids and planets as well as material released from comets during solar heating. Once having acquired Earth-crossing orbits this material enters Earth’s atmosphere with velocities of up to 72 km/s. Frictional deceleration during atmospheric entry leads to either vaporization, complete melting or partial melting and determines the final shape of the surface reaching objects. Currently, about 64,700 meteorites have been recovered, classified and named. They are witnesses of the very early processes occurring in the solar system including condensation of the first solids, accretion, aqueous and thermal metamorphism and finally magmatic differentiation of large parent bodies. The most primitive meteorites furthermore allow determining the age and chemical bulk composition of the Solar System. Pre-solar grains found in several meteorite classes give insights in element-forming stellar nucleosynthesis processes and organic molecules preserved in carbon-rich meteorites may even suggest that meteorites contributed to the evolution of life on Earth.
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Source http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/.
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Greshake, A., Fritz, J. (2018). Meteorites. In: Rossi, A., van Gasselt, S. (eds) Planetary Geology. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65179-8_6
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