Mineralogy of Asteroids

The past decade has seen a significant expansion both in the interpretive methodologies used to extract mineralogical information from asteroid spectra and other remote-sensing data and in the number of asteroids for which mineralogical characterizations exist. Robust mineralogical characterizations now exist for more than 40 asteroids, an order a magnitude increase since Asteroids II was published. Such characterizations have allowed significant progress to be made in the identification of meteorite parent bodies. Although considerable progress has been made, most asteroid spectra have still only been analyzed by relatively ambiguous curvematching techniques. Where appropriate and feasible, such data should be subjected to a quantitative analysis based on diagnostic mineralogical spectral features. The present paper reviews the recent advances in interpretive methodologies and outlines procedures for their application.