Mineralogical investigation of ordinary chondrites

陨石对我们了解太阳系的形成至关重要，因为大多数陨石是在45亿年前形成的，就在太阳系形成的时候。

Meteorites are crucial to our understanding of the formation of the Solar System because most formed about 4.5 billion years ago, right around when our Solar System was created. The largest group of meteorites is called ordinary chondrites. A subset of these are called L6 meteorites and are designated "highly shocked", meaning that the parent body on which they originated was hit by tremendous pressure, causing the minerals in these meteorites to develop features such as shock veins. Of further interest is that this tremendous pressure is very likely similar to that deep inside our Earth, so one can study the minerals within the L6 meteorites to learn more about what is happening in our Earth's interior. Meteorite samples are also very important because they are used to design many of the instruments used on space missions, such as the Mars rovers. The Hayabusa spacecraft will return to Earth in 2010 after having acquired samples from asteroid 25143 Itokawa and in 2016, the Dawn mission will return, after orbiting 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta. There is an increased interest in asteroid materials by both NASA and space agencies worldwide; understanding the minerals in meteorites is key to both the development of missions and the interpretation of spectral imaging collected. The objective of this study is to perform a systematic, comprehensive mineralogical study of highly shocked ordinary chondrites, the major group of meteorites, specifically the shock veins in over 50 L6 meteorites, to further our understanding of the origins of the Solar System. Specifically, the twin goals are to investigate the mineralogical make-up of these L6 meteorites in order to help understand the parent body on which they originated; and to potentially shed light in our understanding of the formation of the early Solar System.