The Fe-Ni metal can be present as chunks, pebbles and granules. Stony irons resemble the outer cores or mantles of planetoids or else a mix of materials due to a collision. Achondrites are the result of gravitational differentiation in relatively large bodies by melting and gravitational separation of mineral phases, and most resemble the Earth's crust. If you were walking around in a field and saw a chondrite, it would be much more recognizable as being of nonterrestrial origin than the above achondrites. There are different subcategories of chondrites.
Chondrites generally show much cooler histories than other meteorites.
Some chondrites appear to be from noncollisional origins, e.g., a small archaic accretion. These elements readily dissolve into the metal that exists, and the less metal that exists, the less diluted they are. Many asteroids are richer in most of these metals than the richest Earth ores which we mine. Further, these metals all occur in one ore when it comes to asteroids. As discussed later in this chapter, the exact same process used to extract and separate these precious metals from the world's largest nickel ore mine at the Sudbury Astrobleme in Canada is easily used in space, and is a simple process using only carbon, sulfur and oxygen, all of which can be derived from asteroids, too.