Rocks falling from the sky have a long and colorful history. I mean this both in a socio-economic sense and, perhaps more obviously, in a scientific sense. Stories of stones from the heavens have been with us for as long as humans have left traces of themselves. In ancient tombs and burial sites, in their earliest writings and during the faltering steps of the industrial revolution and the creation of modern science, people wrote about rocks from the sky now known as meteorites. In many respects the history of modern science instrumention is inextricably linked with the history meteorite studies.

Meteorites are major witnesses of the history of our Solar System. Everyone agrees that meteorites are ancient materials from the earliest stages in the history of the Solar System. Their age, composition, and texture clearly point to this conclusion. Everyone also agrees that meteorites are fragments from near-Earth asteroids, which occasionally threaten us with impact, and it seems that such asteroids largely come out of the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter although a small fraction of them are probably related to comets. These rocks are fascinating to study. They are sufficiently like terrestrial rocks that similar techniques and approaches can be used, yet they present a whole new range of physical and chemical processes to consider, processes that take the researcher from petrologist, mineralogist, and geochemist to the astronomer and the astrophysicist.