Earth's meteorites linked to single asteroid
Thursday, August 25, 2011 - 17:00
in Astronomy & Space
Dust grains gathered by a Japanese spacecraft from the asteroid Itokawa contain the primitive elements that formed the early solar system, studies find.The first dust samples ever retrieved from an asteroid and brought back for study show that a portion of the most common meteorites to hit Earth may have come from a single rocky ancestor out in space, Japanese researchers say.