Part of the fascination in studying chondrites stems from the possibility that they may preserve a record of events in the protoplanetary disc. A 4 cm long slice from the Bovedy meteorite, an ordinary chondrite. Bovedy fell in Northern Ireland on the evening of 25 April 1969 after a bright fireball was observed over much of England. The exact method of formation of chondrules remains unknown although a wide variety of formation mechanisms has been proposed. Planetary' scenarios have also been proposed, e.g. chondrule formation from the 'spray' produced in collisions of partly molten asteroids, or formation through impact processes in asteroid regoliths.
Meteorites are pieces of asteroids.
We know this because four meteorites were observed well enough during atmospheric entry to permit computation of their orbits, which turned out to be similar to those of the Earth crossing asteroids. Most asteroids orbit the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but a small fraction have orbits which bring them near the Earth. To date, three asteroids have been viewed in close up by spacecraft - Gaspra , Ida , and most recently, Mathilde . This work is done jointly with Dr Ian Lyon and Professor Grenville Turner, and also other collaborators as noted below. The grains all contain very Fe-poor olivine and appear to have suffered less thermal metamorphism than most of the olivine in Julesburg.