Meteorites & Asteroids?

Question

How does the study of meteorites and asteroids contribute to the understanding of the formation of the planets?

Also

Where is the Asteroid Belt located in the solar system and what does it look like?

Answer 1

A little more specifically, meteorites contain little inclusions called "chondrules" which have not been melted and reformed since they first formed in the proto-planetary disk around our sun. All rocks we find on Earth or any other world have been formed since that time; the "fingerprint" of what conditions were like in space before becoming part of a planet is lost. This is not the case for chondrules in meteorites.

Chondrules give us insight into the sorts of particles that were available for larger bodies (and eventually planets) to form from.

You can read about chondrules on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondrule

Asteroids are examples of the smallest gravitationally bound objects in the solar system. These are possible building blocks of protoplanets (enough of them stick together and you can have enough gravity to start pulling dust and even gas right out of the proto-solar disk). By understanding their characteristics, we can more accurately model the formation of protoplanets.

Answer 2

Each asteroid has its own story to tell. When ever we find a piece of an asteroid, that helps us in understanding what conditions are like throughout that particular part of the solar system. Asteroids and meteorites played a significant roll in the formation of the planets also.

It is believed that meterorites and asteroids were the building blocks for the planets. Early in the solar systems history the area was littered with rocks and asteroids. Eventually over time these rocks grouped together to form small bodies and then as they grew their gravitational force grew and so more and more were drawn in. This theory is known as accretion. Where as now there are 4 rocky worlds Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars there was once hundreds of smaller bodies.

In 1994 the solar system gave us an example of accretion. About a year earlier scientists David Levy, Eugene Shoemaker and his wife Carolyn discovered a comet. They named it Shoemaker Levy 9. What really took them by surprise was that they determined that in July 1994 Shoemaker Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. The comet fragmented into around 20 pieces and slammed into jupiter. This is what was happening constanly in the early solar system asteroids and comets slamming into each other and growing in size. Jupiter grew in size a little during that period in 1994. Water was dumped in its atmosphere.

The asteroid belt is located between mars and jupiter.

Answer 3

This is believed to be the stuff that planets are made from.