Asteroid Mining
This page hosts a growing list of tools related to asteroid resources. Contact me: cannon@mines.edu; 401-340-6608.
Meteorite Asteroid Links
It's an ongoing challenge to connect the meteorites in our collections to the asteroid parent bodies they came from. Some links&emdash; like that between ordinary chondrites and S-complex asteroids&emdash;have been confirmed by sample return. Others are much more tentative, based on spectral similarities between lab samples and telescopic observations of asteroids. This map includes the major meteorite groups and their materials (broken down into silicates/sulfides/oxides, metals, clays and organics), the asteroid groups based on the Bus-DeMeo taxonomy (including their mean geometric albedos from the SMASS-II survey), and links between them that have been proposed in the literature.
Version 0.1 is included below, and is free to use with attribution. Some errors and omissions are likely; contact me with any issues and they will be fixed in later versions.
