Meteorites: samples of NEOs in the laboratory

Meteorites can be considered as samples of near-Earth objects (NEOs), and as such they may be useful for inferring the properties of the latter, including those that may encounter the Earth in the future. This article reviews the main properties of meteorites which can be of interest in NEO research. We first briefly recall the characteristics of a meteorite fall and the biases it introduces in the passage from the near Earth meteoroid population to the meteorite population. We then describe in more detail the mineralogical and chemical composition of the various classes of meteorites. The relations between meteorites and asteroids that can be inferred from reflectance spectroscopy, and the porosity of meteorites are treated in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. The last section deals with meteorite ages, with emphasis on the cosmic ray exposure age. To cite this article: (c) 2005 Academie des sciences. Published by Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.