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 precious metals than the richest Earth ores which we mine. Further, these metals all occur in one ore when it comes to asteroids, not in separate ores. 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.
Some chondrites are poor in volatiles, while others are rich in volatiles, such as water and carbon.
It should be noted that there are meteorites that defy categorization in that they are significantly different from meteorites in any of the above classes. Some potentially new classes of meteorite are represented by only one specimen. Likewise, there are sometimes major compositional differences within established classes of meteorites, and frequent overlap between classes in terms of the mineral distributions. For example, some achondrites have a few percent carbon. Some chondrites have veins of water soluble salts as if deposited by movement of water as in hydrothermal processes that occured on Earth.