Meteorite Delivery and Transport

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Abstract
Understanding how meteorites and near–Earth asteroids reach their Earth–crossing orbits starting as fragments from main–belt asteroids is a basic prerequisite to identifying the original parent bodies of these objects and building a self–consistent cosmogonical interpretation of the observed properties of meteorites. We review the recent progress made in this area and the most important remaining open problems. These concern the physics of asteroidal collisions, the size distribution of small main–belt asteroids, the efficiency of different dynamical routes, and the relationships between asteroid taxonomic types based on spectrophotometry data and meteorite classes having different thermal histories and compositions.