Michael Blackburn, age 9, of Mont Apica, P.2., Ont., Canada, for his question:
What are asteroids made of?
The asteroids swing around the sun like a swarm of golden bees. There are thousands of these miniature planets, but not one of them is big enough for Our eyes to See. Once in a great while an asteroid comes closer to us than the moon. But the tiny space traveler is ,just a few Miles wide. It is not easy to discover what asteroids are made of.
The biggest of the asteroids are perhaps 500 Miles wide. There are thousands and thousands of smaller ones, some of them no bigger than pebbles. All these tiny space travelers orbit around and around the sun. Most of them stay between the orbits of Mars and giant Jupiter. These fellows never come closer to us than 50 million Miles. Many of them are more than x+00 million Miles away from us.
The experts could never discover what these faraway midgets were made of. But once in a while a stray asteroid comes closer, much closer. The experts suspect that sometimes an asteroid collides with our big planet. It plunges through the air, catching fire as it falls. It may drop with a splash into the sea or land with a thud on the ground. This fallen space traveler is now a Meteorite.
A meteorite can be examined and tested. The experts can tell us what it is made of, and. Perhaps other asteroids are made of the same materials. Meteorites are made of solid minerals, somewhat like the minerals in our solid earth. But they are full of surprises. Some are made mostly from stony minerals like those in the rocky crust of the earth. Some are made mostly of metals, such as nickel and iron. Other meteorites are mixtures of stony and metallic minerals.
We can guess that the faraway little a8'tex'07.ds are made from minerals like the m7.nerals We See every day. Some are rocky pebbles, and some are made Mostly of heavy metals. A few of them may be made from soft clay. We live in the Space Age, and experts are Very interested in the meteorites, which may be fallen asteroids. They ax’s visitors from space. They can tell us about the other members of our solar system. Perhaps they can tell us what our space travelers will find in the lonely reaches between the planets.
The minerals in a meteorite are studied under powerful microscopes and given many different tests. These type meteorites have minerals like those in the rich soil of the earth. Stony meteorites are often embedded with hard little grains of crystal. Some experts think that swarms of these little crystals once drifted through the solar system. In time, countless numbers of them may have joined together to form the mighty planets.