Meteorite provenance and the asteroid connection

Abstract: The matching of meteorite ypes held in our collections to asteroid classes, and even individual asteroids, may perhaps be said to commence with Olmsted's meteor researches and Wienek's pioneering photographic meteor image taken in 1885. Photo-graphic fireball network surveys started up during the 1960s and three major national programmes were initiated during this period; each resulting in the recovery of one meteor-ite, Pfibram, Lost City and Innisfree. Although photographic surveys had low meteorite recovery rates they, nevertheless, provided invaluable data on the population of meteoroids in near-Earth space. Dynamical considerations ~e paramount in connecting meteorites with cometary or aster-oidal sources of supply. Ernst Opik originally raised the question of locating the mechanism for delivering asteroid fragments to Earth within a timescale and flux that matches known meteorite falls. Several workers took up (3pik's 1963 challenge, so that today the dynamical conditions and potential delivery mechanisms existing at the Kirkwood Gaps within the asteroid belt are better understood. Pioneering work by Brobovnikoff in 1929 initiated the field of spectrophotometric studie