INTRODUCTION

Asteroidal meteorites form the bulk of the collection. The fact that we can find lunar and martian samples in Antarctica has been a very nice dividend for the ANSMET project and has helped significantly in ensuring a continuation of its funding over many years. But these samples are isolated faces in an enormous crowd – memorable and important, true, but very few in number. Almost all antarctic meteorites (and also meteorites fallen in the rest of the world) are believed to be asteroidal meteorites. By this we mean that they are fragments of larger bodies whose abode is (or was) the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter within which we have telescopic evidence of the existence of thousands of bodies in orbit about the sun. All the bodies we have detected telescopically, of course, are larger than the bodies we have collected on the earth as meteorites. If there are thousands of asteroids large enough to see from Earth with a telescope, there must be millions or billions of meteoroid-size particles there, too small to be seen, but each following its individual path in orbit about the sun. What we have in our meteorite collections is a tiny sample of all the meteorites whose orbits have, for one reason or another, become earth-crossing. These earth-crossers, in turn, are only a small fraction of the numbers of meteoroids that must remain in the asteroid belt.