Asteroid Day is a celebratory one for the Field Museum, whose scientists just classified a rare meteorite

“There are really like two directions you can take the study of meteorites, and one is to study early solar system history to get a clearer idea of what the early solar system looked like,” Valdes said. “The other is to understand our own planet, actually. Unlike on Earth, where our early history has largely been overprinted by geological processes, asteroids … have not undergone the same sort of geological overprinting. Their histories are really frozen in time, they have pristine records of early solar system history. So by studying asteroids, we really get a clear idea of how the Earth came to be, how it was processed and why it looks the way it does today.”